The Anti-Federalists are back. Credit: UnHerd
In 1787, as the United States debated whether to ratify the Constitution, a pamphleteer writing as “Philadelphiensis” complained of the threat that a strengthened federal union would pose to any free citizen: it could demand “immoderate” taxes, seizing land and livestock to pay for the state’s oppressive debts. In 2025, the same image of a bloated, tyrannical Leviathan is invoked to justify Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Though President Trump appears to have slapped Musk’s wrist at a Cabinet meeting, it’s far from clear if DOGE, having taken on a life of its own, will slow down any time soon. Though billed as an “advisory body”, it is tearing through swathes of the federal bureaucracy with the reckless abandon that Silicon Valley applies to newly acquired firms. Yet critics and fans alike struggle to put DOGE into a historical context, which makes it difficult to see where it might lead.
Liberals have predictably fallen back on references to mid-century fascism, comparing the recent mass firings to the Nazi takeover of German state and society to ensure total loyalty. But this is wide of the mark, as even vocal Trump supporters within government have been sacked like all others. Then, too, as Musk himself has pointed out, a regime that “seeks to limit the size, scope and power of government” probably isn’t a fascist one.
The Right, meanwhile, hails DOGE as a continuation of conservative cost-cutting that aligns with longstanding GOP priorities. This view, too, isn’t quite right. It fails to appreciate the unprecedented scale of DOGE’s disruption, as well as the department’s wilfully indiscriminate approach, making it difficult to class alongside past, more cautious and strategic attempts at government reorganisation.
How, then, does one begin to grasp the deeper significance, and likely logical endpoint of DOGE? There is one historical reference point from the early republic that would seem to explain the aims and designs of DOGE better than most: the faction represented by “Philadelphiensis” — namely, the Anti-Federalists.
Thorns in the side of the authors of The Federalist, the Anti-Federalists opposed the very existence and legitimacy of the federal government, preferring instead the looser ties, lighter burdens, and wafer-thin national authority mandated by the Articles of Confederation, America’s basic law until the ratification of the current Constitution in 1788. They warned against making the change, believing it would lead to “despotism, thraldom, and confusion”.
Here is the thing, though: the Articles of Confederation were put into effect for eight years in the early republic. And they failed miserably, as the myriad fiscal, monetary, executive, and judicial affairs fell into disarray. That turn of events impelled the founders to take up the Constitution now in place, with its vision of a strong federal state.
This isn’t to suggest that Musk or any of his acolytes have ever read the works of George Mason, Melancton Smith, Patrick Henry, Samuel Bryan, Robert Yates, or other Anti-Federalist luminaries; the Muskians don’t read much beyond memes. Rather, it suffices to highlight the stark convergence of sentiment and disposition that unites DOGE with the opponents of the Constitution, and to see both factions as giving expression to a recurring militant anti-centralist tendency in American history.
Insofar as there are contemporary thinkers who are able to articulate a larger vision around which DOGE’s actions might cohere, there is the writer Curtis Yarvin and the bitcoin investor Balaji Srinivasan. These men aren’t so much direct influences on the boy-hackers ransacking government IT systems, so much as the most advanced expositors of the common worldview that animates Silicon Valley. Examining that worldview reveals striking parallels (as well as notable differences) with Anti-Federalism.
Much like Anti-Federalism, the Silicon Valley ethos is premised on a vehement rejection of centralised power in favour of smaller units of political sovereignty that exist well below the level of the nation-state. But instead of states’ rights, the ideal is the agile tech firm. Such a firm retains the spirit of the small startup (no matter how big it actually gets), remains unencumbered by bureaucratic complexity, and perfectly reflects the Promethean will of its founder.
The firm ideal informs Silicon Valley’s understanding of all social and political order. If DOGE is “moving fast and breaking things” in Washington, it is with the goal of accelerating the process of effective decentralisation. And if Srinivasan has gone the furthest in envisioning what this new normal could look like, in his treatise The Network State (2022), it is arguably Yarvin who has dwelt most fully on how state dissolution might be realised.
Yarvin has written of the sudden breakup and collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev as an instructive example for how a similar disintegration of federal power might be enacted in the United States. (“Maybe we could get to the same place in the same way?”) In Yarvin’s telling, the path to liberation goes through a paradox: the oppressive nexus of power that is the American government can only be undone by granting an even more awesome and unlimited power to a single autocratic figure, referred to in his writings as a “CEO”.
This CEO could then be tasked with either disciplining or annihilating the civil service as functional body in what would amount to an “American perestroika”, which Yarvin defines, simplistically, as “any restructuring that renders the whole American government accountable”. That echoes the benign-sounding rationale that Musk has also employed in his defence of DOGE, telling reporters: “That’s what democracy is all about.”
The CEO figure, in this scheme, isn’t expected to be a manager or a builder, but a raider and a destroyer in the vein of GE’s Jack Welch, who hollowed out the once great industrial giant. Or indeed, Musk’s own slashing and burning at Twitter, now X, which has led to declining functionality, revenue, and engagement.
Seen from this vantage, the DOGE austerity blitzkrieg starts to make much more sense. The Anti-Federalists couldn’t accept the practical arguments, prompted by the failures of the articles, for a government that could assume greater responsibilities over financial management and national defence, viewing these as usurpations. Just so, DOGE rejects the premise that the “administrative state” has any business providing vital services that a large complex economy can hardly do without: basic research for the treatment of diseases, the collection and dissemination of weather forecasts, the prevention of financial fraud, the provision of assistance to vulnerable economic sectors, and much else of the kind.
These are, of course, the very functions that DOGE has either obliterated or severely undermined. (This, even as Musk built his own fortune off of such government assistance — and continues to do so even now.) But as many angry town halls and protests are asking: “who voted for this?” Are the American people really prepared to watch as their two-century-old national constitutional government goes the way of the old Soviet Union, rendered a relic of history?
Already, broad constituencies are banding to reassert the same logic that led the Founders to abandon the Articles of Confederation in favour of the stronger state envisioned by the actual US Constitution: veterans, farmers, consumers, workers, small business, bond holders, entitlement beneficiaries, and many others are threatened by DOGE’s dramatic gutting of state capacity and fiscal functionality. Furthermore, DOGE’s tinkering around with federal payment systems isn’t at all reassuring, as any disruption to Social Security and Treasury bond payments would all but seal America’s drift toward failed-state status.
Contra Yarvin, it should be remembered that what followed Gorbachev wasn’t a period of flourishing, but a protracted collapse in living standards and a power vacuum that led to oligarchs, warlords, and gangsters ruling the roost. It didn’t kill the Soviet deep state, but allowed it to come back later with a vengeance.
Nineties Russia, with its rapacious private client networks operating under a fatally weakened central state, is a more honest picture of what a quasi-anarchic “Network State” would look in practice than Srinivasan’s techno-utopia. Yet this is the direction in which DOGE is dragging the United States.
While the current grassroots ferment against DOGE is heartening, what’s needed is a new political narrative that connects the ideal of a strong, stable, reliable, and competent federal government to the survival of the American nation as a cohesive entity handed down by the founders. For what Fisher Ames said at the 1788 convention of Massachusetts resonates ever more today: “The Union is essential to our being as a nation. The pillars that prop it are crumbling to powder”.
There is, after all, a reason why the Anti-Federalists, despite honourable contributions to American life, chiefly the Bill of Rights, are not generally seen as high-ranking founders, while those who endeavoured to solidify the foundations of the federal union are venerated almost unequivocally as nation-builders: the Federalists, of course, but also Lincoln Republicans, New Deal Democrats, and the GOP’s postwar Nixon-Eisenhower tradition.
To be sure, government bloat, waste, and overreach are perennial problems that definitely need fixing. But they call for a judicious approach that recognises the many intricate interdependencies that exist between the federal government and various sectors of American society. Or as Trump himself put it recently, what’s needed is a “scalpel” not a “hatchet”.
But what our Silicon Valley overlords are up to isn’t a genuine search for efficiency, but rather destruction for the sake of it. Left unopposed, these latter-day Anti-Federalists might finally trash the federal union as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary next year. What comes after could well be too grim to contemplate.
1TrueCuencoism 
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SubscribeI forgot the part in Federalist Papers where Hamilton and Madison declared that the three branches of government would eventually need to become subservient to an Expert Politburo. There is absolutely no parallel for this historical analogy. At what point did the Framers envision a sprawling administrative state unaccountable to citizens?
And federal judges who have the right to veto the government’s decision for the entire federation.
A valid criticism. While the spirited arguments of a powerful central government vs. a limited government, local control, and personal freedom is as old as the Republic, it has never really gone away. It has taken different forms at different times and swung between extremes throughout the nation’s history in response to changing economic and social conditions and been impacted by changing technology as well. The Articles of Confederation were a failure of over two centuries ago based on the the specific conditions at that time, and the Constitution was the answer. There have been many subsequent debates in American history between the rights of states and the people vs. a powerful central government but each is a product of it’s own historical era. So is this one. Yes, the spirit of the argument is much the same as it ever was but everything else is different.
It’s interesting that the author drops some relatively obscure names in his list of ‘anti-federalists’, yet fails to mention the most prominent anti-federalist, Thomas Jefferson. Quite a curious omission, given the importance of his thoughts and philosophy and that he founded the party that actually opposed the federalists in the first several contested national elections. The Constitution probably would not have been accepted and adopted had not Madison, who was a friend and colleague of Jefferson (he later served as Jefferson’s Secretary of State), and something of an anti-federalist himself, not introduced the Bill of Rights as a guarantee against intrusive federal power. Without that, Jefferson and his supporters (some of whom were in the author’s list) might have finally come down against the Constitution, and who knows what would have happened after that. The author fails to mention any of this, perhaps because it might give the impression that there are two sides to the story both then and now. There’s nothing liberals seem to like less than the idea that people can have different viewpoints without either being ‘wrong’. He also is probably coming to terms with having his illusions of human progress and the nature of America shattered by a second Trump victory greater than the first. Neoliberal globalists had basically declared Jeffersonian politics dead and buried and his Hamiltonian opposition victorious. It’s been a rude awakening for many that the Jeffersonian spirit that separated America from Europe and makes it impossible to govern the USA like a European state is alive and back with a vengeance. I count this article as one of several I’ve seen hear and elsewhere that expresses the same utter shock and horror at this revelation and predicts impending doom will surely follow. I suppose we’ll see.
Well, ok, but neither did Publius argue for a phalanx of unaccountable technocrat ‘efficiency’-raiders.
What does this man think we’re supposed to do, keep spending three trillion dollars more than we take in every year? When did keeping within one’s budget become a sin? He drops a comment at the end, to the effects that, yes, maybe profligate spending is not perfect. The Founders were very clear that, if the body politic is not at least somewhat virtuous, all bets are off anyway.
Someone should explain to Mike that the Antifederalists were just as much of a part of the American founders as the Federalists. Oh and FYI, both would look at imbedded bureaucrats who think they are above the Constitution and haul out the tar and feathers.
Yankee Union Federalists won
Confederate State Rebels lost
George Washington Federalist
Thomas Jefferson not
They Tar & Feathered Tories or Conservatives.
I reckon Jefferson would have loved DOGE. I read recently that his anti-federalist feeling went so far as to reject the idea of ANY government, believing that, if you gave people enough freedom, they would fall into a happy equilibrium and co-exist peacefully without any need for a higher governing power.
I find Thomas Jefferson a fascinating figure, but if he lived today, there’d definitely be such a thing as Jefferson Derangement Syndrome.
[Book tip: American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis]
Because all those countries without a functioning government are peaceful utopias, rather than lawless hellholes run by violent militias! I’m not suggesting this applies to yourself but many Americans seem to look on the collapse of the government as being something positive, a position that always baffles me
No one is pushing for a collapse of the federal govt, just a reduction in its size and scope. But you know this.
Then why did the 13 keep Treading
over all those Natives taking their Land ?
One only has to view Zimbabwe whose abandonment of law and order in favour of governmental corruption, violence, neoptism and theft has delivered untold misery to its populations for 45 hellish years.
And to think how ‘we’ fêted the dreadful Mugabe or Ebagum as we used to call the beast.
Then there’s Mr Amin and many others of various degrees of savagery. Not a good report it must be said.
I don’t think Jefferson was actually an anarchist, but there’s general agreement that prehistoric tribal societies were not as disorganized, violent, or chaotic as our failed states of today are. In my view, the logic of anarchism fails because of how modern conditions differ from natural conditions. Human nature is competitive both individually and collectively because resources like food and water are scarce and people and tribes can fight and assert possession over such things. In prehistoric times, there were few people and they reproduced to the level that they could sustain by simple hunter/gatherer living. The invention of farming changed things. Farming allowed a far greater number of people to survive in the same area without improving their condition in other ways. It’s no accident that organized states and organized governments arose almost in perfect parallel with the invention of agriculture.
If you put two male Siamese fighting fish into a fishbowl, they will fight until one of them kills the other, because these fish are basically territorial and instinctively assert their supremacy over a territory and establish a set population density, at least for males. Humans are far more complex in their behavior than fish, and are social creatures that live in tribes, but within that complexity and within the context of tribalism, it stands to reason that there is, for lack of a better term, an ideal population density for human thriving, a natural number of humans in a given space or community. Further, from the invention of farming onward, virtually every organized civilization on the planet has greatly exceeded this ideal number. Where there is no force of government, there is violence and conflict on par with the conflict between the ideal population density and the realized population density. Thus, the failure of anarchism is a necessary corollary to there being too many people in too small an area, and there’s probably very little that can be done to fix it. Evolution works on a far greater timescale than we do. It has no hope of keeping up with technological advances.
That’s my theory anyway. Viewed this way, Anarchism isn’t so much ‘wrong’ as it is impractical given current conditions, much like communism. Both of these governing philosophies might well have been viable in preshistoric times. Check out John Calhoun’s “mouse utopia’ experiments sometime. Fascinating study on how behavior can be affected by population density even when food and water are abundant.
Hardly surprising given the ‘hanky panky’ that went on at Monticello with his black concubine/ belly warmer.
As to his “all men are created equal” quip, given his understandable enthusiasm for slavery, that must be one of the most hypocritical utterances on record.
Finally goading idiotic Madison to invade Canada didn’t go down too well, as the scars on the White House attest to this day.
Quite – when I wrote “fascinating”, it wasn’t meant all positively. Other things about Jefferson which I find deeply unappealing: his apparent failure to understand his contribution to his wife’s deteriorating health (and eventual death) due to repeated pregnancies and births. And let’s not forget his unique ability to live in a state of complete self-contradiction, as some say, without seeming to notice.
I am so sorry I completely misunderstood you.
Nations/peoples must always have their heroes but I always thought he was a very odd choice.
No need to apologise, Charles – I caught myself out, forgetting that written comments aren’t really the best medium to express a dash of irony!
Jefferson envisioned a rural America, where self-sufficient land owning yeoman farmers would mostly mind their own business. He was not just skeptical of a centralized federal government but also of industrialization, financial institutions and large urban centers. He believed that all of these things would lead to concentrations of wealth and power and thus corruption. So he would have also really disliked the tech oligarchy. His vision was a bit primitivist libertarian/anarchist with some proto-socialist tendencies, which he saw as the way to really implement the ideals of the enlightenment.
This is indeed an accurate account of Jefferson’s ideals. I’m certain he would be utterly horrified by the USA that exists today. Jefferson would have hated the global oligarchy, big banks, Wall Street, the Washington bureaucracy. He would have considered modern cities to be vile cesspits beyond anything he could have imagined. The expression ‘rolling over in his grave’ is overused, but it is appropriate here. There is a repository of Jeffersonian sentiment in rural America that shows in Trump’s utter domination of rural white voters. It must be clear to the globalists at this point they can never truly conquer it anymore than Napoleon or Hitler could conquer Russia. There has to be some accommodation reached or the conflict will destroy the country. Trump is trying and the Democrats are not, so I must prefer the former.
Plus the Thomas Paine view of property limitation to small 40 acres farms.
Jefferson was not an anarchist. More than any of the other founding fathers except perhaps Franklin, who he often collaborated with, Jefferson was prone to thinking in purely philosophical and theoretical terms. Some of his more extreme views are better understood in that sense of a philosopher rather than a statesman. He never advocated for anything like true anarchism. He rather lamented the fact that government was necessary and often speculated on how it might theoretically reduced and eliminated beyond the practical means he endorsed as a statesman. He understood the distinction between what was possible in the real world as it existed and what wasn’t. He had an ideology, but he was never an ideologue in his political career, but rather a practical statesman with an overarching motivation for preserving freedom as much as practically possible.
“How, then, does one begin to grasp the deeper significance, and likely logical endpoint of DOGE?“
Start with accepting that the status quo is not tenable. That’s why Trump was elected. People see the debt, live with the inefficiency, and are forced to pay for the bloat that is finally being exposed. Again, this has less to do with Trump himself than with the conditions that made his election possible.
Excellent thought provoking article. Thank you.
Hamilton et al, calling themselves “Federalists” was a pre-Orwell example of “Newspeak”. They were centralists seeking direct taxing power for a new entity. The articles of Confederation were already a Federal structure, but with no centre. Those that Hamilton labelled “anti-Federalist” were the true Federalists.
Please direct us to any historical writing describing the articles of confederation a success.
I take your point; Hamilton and Co. may have stolen a march on their opponents by preemptively grabbing the term. But I don’t know if that move could really be called Orwellian. They weren’t calling war peace or freedom slavery. It’s more that the whole-and-parts notion implicit in the term ‘federal’ can be emphasized either way.
Lighten up, Francis. The leviathan is too omnipresent, the operatives too deeply empowered for a Soviet union redux. Especially at this period of time. System works well for too many citizens, where Soviet did not. Of course, the US could find itself there in children’s or grandchildren time.
DOGE is a great light and e-brake on the leviathan. It’s effect, one hopes, will be real and significant. Yet it will not unravel the Constitution as is suggested here.
Tech Bros can have their worldview. Even have their guy on the inside. They lack the power to shut it down beyond a hopefully important reset.
As always compromise and a cool head ought to deliver a happy medium between the articles of confederation (or this Cassandra’s more chaotic warning) and what this govt has become. Trump just has to start from an extreme position. That’s how genuinely bad the situation is now.
“Lighten up Francis” described what I was thinking as well but the “Stripes” quote didn’t come to mind. That was pithy. We’re not very good at both/and thinking in the west and thus not very adept at managing polarities. The Federalists were incapable of seeing any downsides to their view and likewise with the Anti-Federalists.
The centralization versus decentralization polarity, or ongoing tension, has been poorly managed. Each pole has upsides and each has downsides. The proponents of each pole can be relied upon to raise red flags when the downsides of the other pole begin to rear their head. The U.S. has been moving toward the centralization pole for quite some time and the downsides have become quite recognizable. The goal should be to realize the upsides of both poles, but politicians are mostly incapable of adopting this mindset. So we’ve had to wait for the overemphasis on the centralization pole to produce very noticeable downsides before we can muster the momentum to swing toward the decentralization pole.
The centralization pole was really given an advantage by the lack of term limits for members of Congress. They need the power and the money to reside with the federal government so they can stay in power, often for decades. So it’s no surprise that most members of Congress hang out on the centralization end of the pole. Another great advantage for centralization was when the U.S. Constitution was amended to allow federal income taxes. I suspect the Federalists never thought Americans would ever allow this to happen.
Moving more towards decentralization and reducing the size of our centralized leviathan would seem to be a healthy thing for the country.
I’m the first to celebrate any efforts to “limit the size, scope and power of government”.
But does Musk truly believe in liberty, or has he got his sights set on oligarchic technocracy. If so, downsizing the federal government could go hand-in-hand with outsourcing its powers to the private sector.
If you hate the thought of central bank digital currency, as I do, then you might be equally wary of a future where we choose between XCoin, AmazonCoin, GoogleCoin and MicrosoftCoin – each programmed to be worthless within a year, or sooner if you criticise the corresponding tech overlord.
Had to have the obligatory dig at Elon, didn’t we? Revenues are down at X but profitability is up, thanks to effective cost-cutting.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/02/x-in-2024-doubled-highest-yearly-twitter-profits.html
Not the best examples of “vital services”.
Weather forecasts can clearly be handled by the private sector. Federal involvement in “basic research for the treatment of diseases” has been disastrous, and “vulnerable economic sectors” don’t deserve support just because they’re vulnerable.
The author short shrifts the ant-federalists, but he fails to discuss their ideological heirs, the democratic-republicans. They counted the most influential founders in their ranks; Jefferson and Madison. Both limited the power of the federal government while they were president. They understood the oppressive power of centralized governance.
Executive agencies are not co-equal branches of government. While some bureaucracy is inevitable, the federal government has grown to such size that it overwhelms the Constitutional order. Today, these agencies have tendrils in every facet of American life. They shouldn’t. Excising the tumor always hurts a little bit.
Many overlook the importance of questioning who provides the information. The messenger shapes the message.
Figures like Yarvin etal do not seek progress; they seek destruction. The key question is: Are they driven by pain and retribution, or by genuine improvement and transcendence? This article fails to provide that context, making it essential to research their beliefs independently and form your own conclusions.
History offers a precedent. After Germany’s defeat, its division into East and West was not just geopolitical but psychological—designed to break its intellectual and cultural dominance. The U.S. absorbed much of Germany’s intellectual capital, fueling its own rise. But today, if America fractures, there is no external force ready to absorb its failure. Instead, global powers like China/Russia are watching, waiting—not as passive observers, but as strategic actors who would shape the world that emerges from the wreckage.
This is where Yarvin and others reveal their shortsightedness. They assume that breaking the system guarantees them (or their likes) a role in rebuilding it. But today’s geopolitical landscape is not post-WWII. There is no vacuum waiting to be filled on their terms. The forces at play are far beyond their control.
This raises the real question: Are these figures advancing America, or dismantling it? And if they succeed, who benefits? Historically, Germany’s dismantling was orchestrated externally. But when a nation turns on itself in a world already shifting, the outcome is unpredictable. If the U.S. follows this path, what emerges may be unrecognizable—not just to its disruptors but to its architects as well.
People like him disguise their motivations under the guise of “all ideas are valid.” to appear intellectual. But few challenge them with hard questions that expose the flaws in their logic and the emotional immaturity driving their beliefs.
The castration of NOAA viewed in the current economic climate where absolutely everything has a monthly charge endangers absolutely everyone of us who is tapped out by these charges. Who is going to warn us of the next Florence and its 10 ft wall of water, unless we have the express high dollar Musk weather services. There is nothing equalizing about the DOGE actions
They are meant to give more power and wealth to the Oligachs and plutocrats.
To unravel the complexity and simplify is a process done in stages. Delayering to a certain point so that relayering results in more effective and efficient interconnectedness. The goal is to break down silos and reconfigure essential services into an integrated whole.
Not easily done when in situ but necessary nevertheless.