Dismissed for years as the “QAnon Congresswoman,” Greene leaves Washington a different woman. Drained of her bubbling “optimism,” as one source close to her put it, Greene is now divorced from her husband and divorced from her president — but faithfully married to the cause of America First.

It was, in Greene’s own telling, the algorithms that sent her spiraling into conspiracy theories in the 2010s. It was algorithms that rocketed her to prominence. It was algorithms that made her one of the GOP’s top fundraising assets. And it may have been algorithms that sent her packing, though they’ll almost certainly guide Greene to her next destination soon enough. 

This is a new form of populism, a strain that represents the online rage fueling an uneasy horseshoe alliance between the populist Left and Right. And it’s no longer confined to the internet. Greene’s arc is what happens when the everyman’s rage is stoked by social media — sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse — and then escapes the algorithm for Washington, DC. 

In her early days in DC, Greene was dogged by headlines like “Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress” and “Video surfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor with baseless claim.” Sworn in about 24 hours before the Jan. 6 riot, Greene was elected amid pandemic fever, cruising to a comfortable victory, in which she won 75% of the vote. 

That put her about six points ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, situated in the state’s northwest corner between Tennessee and Alabama. Greene originally planned to run in her own, more affluent district that included some of Atlanta’s shifting  suburbs, but swapped her bid to the much less competitive 14th District, after the incumbent representative announced his retirement in 2019. 

Georgia 14, long home to the state’s carpet industry, is heavily rural and populated by voters who blame NAFTA and immigration for their economic struggles. Trump was impressed, calling her a “future Republican star” and sending the media — along with the GOP establishment — into a tizzy.  

Born in Milledgeville, a small city of 17,000 in central Georgia, Greene proudly remembers growing up around her family’s construction company. She graduated from South Forsyth High School in 1992, then the University of Georgia in 1996. Six years later, she purchased Taylor Commercial from her father.

In 2022, after 29 years together and 27 years of marriage, Greene’s husband Perry filed for divorce. Greene herself had filed 10 years earlier amid allegations of cheating, though the pair reconciled before calling it quits after she entered Congress. Several months later, Greene and newly divorced conservative media figure Brian Glenn — best known for questioning Volodymyr Zelensky’s wardrobe in the Oval Office — confirmed they were dating. They became engaged on Monday.

Like many Gen-X moms, Greene racked up an extensive Facebook history during the 2010s. Animated by the strains ObamaCare had put on her family’s successful business, the future congresswoman got hooked on Trump early. 

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But her sense of injustice and distrust also sent her in bizarre directions. She questioned whether school shootings were false flags, whether a plane really hit the Pentagon, and what was going on with the internet poster named “QAnon.” Her Wikipedia page is full of reminders of a febrile recent past, including forays into #Pizzagate and Seth Rich, among other conspiracy theories, as Greene used Facebook as a form of activism and started blogging for a website called American Truth Seekers sometime around 2017. 

In the spring of 2019, Greene shouted at Parkland survivor David Hogg in Washington, and filmed a Facebook Live video outside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office telling the lawmaker to “get rid of your diaper.” 

A little more than a year later, the mother of three, Crossfit enthusiast, and small-business owner earned her own office on Capitol Hill, not unlike AOC, the bartender-turned-congresswoman she’d been yelling at months earlier.  

Her pandemic-era campaign made good use of the backlash. “I’ve made all the right enemies,” Greene tweeted during her run. “The Fake News Media hates me. Big Tech censors me. The DC Swamp fears me. Now Soros and the Dems are trying to take me down. I’m running to Save America and Stop Socialism.”

But it was in the new year, after Jan. 6, that a newly elected Greene delivered one of the most significant speeches on the House floor in modern history. Her remarks barely budged the perception of Greene in Washington, and were quickly forgotten. But they shouldn’t have been.

As a vote loomed to strip Greene of her committee assignments, she calmly took to the floor to explain herself. “What you need to know about me is I’m a very regular American, just like the people I represent in my district,” Greene said, mouth hidden behind a face mask emblazoned with the slogan FREE SPEECH. “And like most people across the country, I never, ever considered a run for Congress or even to get involved in politics. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t a political person until I found a candidate that I really liked, and his name is Donald J. Trump.”

But, Greene continued, “when we elected President Trump, and then I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me like Russian collusion, which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so, these things bothered me deeply, and I realized just watching CNN or Fox News, I may not find the truth.” 

“And so,” Greene remembered, it spiraled from there, “What I did is I started looking up things on the internet, asking questions, like most people do every day, using Google. And I stumbled across something and this was at the end of 2017 called QAnon.” 

Greene said she walked away from QAnon and fringe conspiracy trends later in 2018, after discovering holes in the theory. She said her campaign never mentioned the word QAnon. She said she believed Parkland survivor David Hogg.

The speech was contrite and honest, a genuine explanation for how her rational distrust of institutions steered her, and many others, down unfortunate rabbit holes. That experience, if anything, is utterly representative. In her case, it represents both the good and bad: asking the questions, believing the lies, then abandoning them when the facts went in another direction. 

But Greene’s words landed like a lead balloon in DC, where there is scant tolerance for the experience of the ordinary American outside the halls of power. Greene, though, managed to lose only 11 GOP votes when Democrats orchestrated a push to take away her committee assignments amid a full court press from media and the Beltway establishment. 

One congressional insider remembers a tense private meeting ahead of the vote. “She came in and it was during this bruising time of all of her Facebook posts and previous statements being unearthed. This was space laser time,” the insider said. But while Greene was “defiant at first,” she apologized. She stood up and said she was sorry to her fellow members for having to answer for her. “Anytime you get a reporter with concerns about me, you don’t have to answer, just tell them to talk to me,” she told the meeting, striking a “super conciliatory” tone, the insider says.

This “changed the whole mood of the room.” Republicans came up to the microphone and announced they’d vote in her favor. Greene had successfully “lowered the temperature.” 

The mild air, of course, did not last long. Outside the GOP conference, Greene shouted at AOC, repeatedly sought Joe Biden’s impeachment, shouldered heavy fines for refusing to wear a mask, and spoke at — then distanced herself from — a conference held by Nick Fuentes. 

Republicans took back the House majority in 2022, restoring Greene to committee assignments. Greene supported Kevin McCarthy for speaker, and the two remained on good terms even while the Florida populist firebrand Matt Gaetz, with whom Greene once embarked on an “America First” speaking tour, engineered McCarthy’s ouster. Ironically, it was Greene’s sparring with other MAGA populists that ended her time with the hard-Right House Freedom Caucus in 2023.

Nevertheless, “she was in a good spot, she was a productive member of Congress,” the congressional insider recalls of Greene’s tenure before this fall. That same source referred to Greene as Trump’s top “guard dog” in Congress for years. She defended Trump against virtually every charge for half a decade, before and after coming to DC. Just last year, Greene called the president “sweet” and said she was “loyal and unapologetically supported him everywhere and all the time.” 

It was the second Trump administration’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein documents that first drove a wedge between Greene and the president. Then Trump struck Iran, further alienating Greene, whose views on foreign policy lean toward an anti-interventionist flavor of “America First.” Finally, during the government shutdown, Greene started criticizing Republicans sharply for ignoring an imminent health-care crisis: the lapsing of subsidies that would send premiums skyrocketing for low-income people. This brought with it opportunities for the congresswoman, long Trump’s staunchest defender in the House, to join CNN and The View and 60 Minutes. 

By mid-November, Trump had enough. Deeming Greene “Wacky Marjorie,” he posted on Truth Social to say he’d endorse a primary challenge in Georgia 14. Just a few days later, Greene announced her retirement from Congress. 

Two sources separately pinned the blame for Greene’s turn on House Speaker Mike Johnson. As the government shutdown lingered for weeks and weeks, becoming the longest in history, Johnson didn’t take seriously the problem of members leaving DC with heaps of time on their hands. They were idle, looking for fights and itching for media hits. And it’s certainly true that Greene’s differences with Trump escalated during this time.

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Greene could be the tip of the iceberg for Johnson, who now faces a rumored wave of retirements from a deeply frustrated and demoralized conference. What should really keep Republicans up at night is whether Greene’s darkened sentiment is representative of voters, in the same way her experience on Facebook in the first Trump term represented a real growth in conspiracism fueled by institutional failure leading up to the pandemic.

Tempting as it may be to chalk Greene’s turn up to personal eccentricities, and that’s hardly out of the question, Republicans aren’t just losing a pain in leadership’s behind — they’re losing the member with the single highest share of small-dollar donors in all of Congress. 

And that’s not just about money. It means Greene resonates with her party’s base better than almost any lawmaker. (AOC is in a distant second place on that list.)

Yet her departure seems to have prompted a sigh of relief in the House. “I doubt there was a single member sad to see her leave,” one senior House Freedom Caucus source in the lower chamber told me, describing her behavior as “super unprofessional.” Other sources remembered her early days in Congress warmly, but acknowledged she came with a flip side. “She’s genuinely a nice person, but she can lose her shit and be a mean person too,” said one.

In Greene’s case, her policy populism came in temperamental populist packaging. That is to say, she opposed the substance of her party’s policy agenda during Trump II, from the economy to foreign policy, but stylistically she also opposed the longstanding norms of politeness and collegiality with the other side. As Democrats like Jasmine Crockett are starting to flirt with this personality populism, Washington should wonder whether it’s possible to keep a lid on both flavors — the substance and the style. 

Asked about Greene’s retirement, one insider pointed out the news didn’t leak strategically to Beltway rags or break in a juicy sitdown interview before the congresswoman made her announcement. She simply posted it to social media. Ostensibly unscripted and shot on a cellphone, the video featured Greene saying, “Loyalty should be a two-way street and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest, because our job title is literally ‘representative.’”

“She gets the value of wearing your heart on your sleeve,” the source noted. “That’s something Trump taught the Republican Party…. When she talks, a lot of conservative women across the country say, ‘You know what? I’m a pissed-off mom who’s getting crushed by all these stupid things in Washington.’ She’s been able to speak for a lot of people.” 

This is the Epistemology of the Algorithm, a double-edged sword. It exploits our reasonable distrust of institutions, pulling us into irrational conspiracies for rational reasons, stitching together paranoia and anger, driving highs and lows. Consider the Greene who “lowered the temperature” in the private GOP conference meeting ahead of Democrats’ effort to oust her from committees. Then consider the Greene who got booted from the Freedom Caucus. 

The insider described her jokingly as “bipolar,” but in a broader sense, that description makes sense. We’re in the liminal space between life before algorithmic social media and life after it. Gen X and Millennials aren’t quite one or the other. But we can see what’s coming, and Washington is not prepared. Greene wasn’t either.

A not insignificant part of Trump’s support came from algorithmic populists like Greene, people whose political awakening began with Trump and the reaction to him. They got online. They dug deep. They saw Trump as a disruptor. This is a populism built on social media, where the incentive system rewards strong emotion. It’s black and white: trust and distrust, love and hate, in or out. 

Trump’s second-term flirtation with elite interests, from Epstein to foreign policy to Big Tech, puts him on the wrong side of that equation for algorithmic populists like Greene. She’s only a representative for a few more weeks, but she will represent a virtual district of likeminded people for years to come. 

Compelling though the imagery is, we all know that the A-Levels shambles can’t be blamed on rogue formulae alone. The problems go so much deeper than that. I saw some of those deficiencies first hand when I served as Lead Non-Executive Director at the Department for Education between 2013 and 2016. Indeed, I participated in the appointment of the now-departed Permanent Secretary (of which, more below).

It’s clear that if the Government wants to usher in a brighter post-Brexit, post-Covid future it has to fix its own machinery — and this is the very challenge to which the independent Commission for Smart Government is devoted. Launched last month, it will spend the next year exploring how the UK can be better governed. As the recent grades debacle illustrated, there are many questions to which we need urgent answers.

First, where should accountability lie within Whitehall? The system is clear that financial accountability to Parliament lies with the Accounting Officer, usually the Permanent Secretary. Other types of accountability, however, are less transparent. Historically, at least, there has been a tendency for ministers to fall on their sword. This is in keeping with the “myth of ministerial accountability”, which is applied even when the fault is an operational one. The principle must surely remain that those we elect are ultimately accountable — but is it not possible to make a distinction between accountability for operational delivery (the responsibility of the civil service) and accountability for political strategy (the responsibility of ministers)?

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Second, why do we so rarely appoint qualified external candidates as Permanent Secretaries? Back in 2016 I preferred two outside candidates for the DfE job. Ironically, one of those rejected was the very person who warned the Department of the risks arising from re-calibrating the exam results, and the other was head of the UK’s largest private exams assessment organisation. Their experience and skills might have proved invaluable.

Third, why do we call them “Permanent” Secretaries? The job title originated to underline their neutrality and distinguish them from Secretaries of State who come and go with each administration — usually too often. Permanent Secretaries are now appointed for five-year terms, yet the term “permanent” implies their position is secure with little accountability for failure, a title unseen in any other walk of life.

In recent months, some mandarins have begun to look less permanent than others, a small dawning of accountability, perhaps. Some commentators have greeted these unusual departures with shock, as though the removal of those who fail — something we expect in any other sector — was a problem. In fact, if anything needs to be made permanent it is proper accountability.

Fourth, what skills should we expect ministers to have? Of course, it is primarily their political talents that propel them to high office and equip them for the job. But what should they actually know about their subject? Should their position not require at least some domain expertise — a rare occurrence? Indeed, would not some management experience help? We appoint most ministers from the increasingly shallow gene pool of the House of Commons, when we could appoint more from the House of Lords (seeking out proven external talent and ennobling the new recruits). Yet this route has not always been successful. So how could we make the recruitment of talented ministers work better?

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Fifth, Ofqual is, in Whitehall-speak, an “arm’s-length body” (ALB), of which there are anything between 100 and 900, depending on how you define them. According to the most recent National Audit Office report, the ALB sector “remains confused and incoherent. There is no single list of ALBs across government nor a common understanding of when ALBs should be used”. Furthermore, there’s an estimated £110 billion of spending in ALBs which is exempt from spending controls — an eye-watering sum.

The NAO also says that there is “no collective understanding of what type of oversight is appropriate for different types of ALBs”. This was certainly my experience as a Non-Executive Director at DfE. Ministers were frustrated by the independence of ALBs like Ofqual and Ofsted and unclear about the extent to which they could intervene and interact. Ironically, ALBs were created to ensure that those with operational responsibility would be discrete, expert and accountable. In practice they result in no one knowing where accountability lies at all. When are ALBs justified and how should accountability mechanisms work?

Sixth, and finally, how can we improve the way Whitehall handles data? While the infamous algorithm has become a running joke, the fact is that we need to be able to make use of more data, and do so with confidence and common sense. Anybody versed in data knows that the outputs are only as good as the inputs, and that any algorithmic outputs need to be subjected to the scrutiny of common sense.

To paraphrase Gary Kasparov after he had been defeated by Deep Blue, “a machine beats a man but a man plus a machine beats a machine”. Yet how many in Whitehall, including politicians, have the numeracy to be able to interrogate assumptions, outputs and inputs? How do we address the numeracy deficit in our leaders? Increased use of data and technology in public services will require new and improved ways to upskill ministers and officials.

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The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Steve Barclay, has thankfully provided new impetus to improve IT capabilities within Whitehall, but we start from a very weak position. There are multiple legacy systems which don’t speak to each other and only 5% of government IT is in the cloud — an extraordinarily low number compared to the private sector or many other governments.

We are in a new era dominated by the knowledge economy, yet many of the practices and structures in Whitehall still hark back to the 19th century. Changes to the recruitment and training of civil servants and ministers alike must ensure that they are competent and equipped to deal with the major challenges that our country now faces.

Smart government has nothing to do with political ideology. Around the world executives of both Left and Right succeed or fail — but to succeed requires an executive that can deliver, offering accountability, incentives, competence and creativity. There is a growing appetite in this country for change — and the new Cabinet Secretary has a big job in leading a long-overdue Whitehall shake-up.

Sir Paul Marshall is a Member of the Commission for Smart Government governsmarter.org

They helped to lift almost a billion people out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2010. And they drove the so-called ‘Great Enrichment’ – the period since the late 18th century in which real per capita income has risen by 3,000%.

In general, then, open markets are a boon. And the modern rhetoric of ‘free markets’ has had huge value: in the fight against communism in the 1970s and 1980s, in highlighting the dangers of modern socialism in states such as Venezuela, and in making the case for the modern international trading order.

But like all rhetoric, free market rhetoric is better used for put-downs than for policy. It often misses the complexities of modern tech-enabled markets, and underplays the role of the state in creating and sustaining markets. Moreover, it smuggles in a host of mistaken assumptions and ideas, with potentially dire longer-term consequences. Markets are not merely mathematical constructs; they have social and cultural functions as well as economic ones. And they are all different – some very different indeed, from others.

In my recent book on Adam Smith, and in a new essay in Britain beyond Brexit by the 2020 Conservatives, I address these issues directly. What matters is not the rhetoric of free markets, but what that rhetoric often, paradoxically, impedes: the reality of effective competition. More effective competition requires better ways to think about markets, and new means to tackle the lurking monopolies of the tech giants.

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It also means we need to bust the myths.

Myth 1: the truth is that in the modern world there are very few, if any, entirely free markets – markets that do not rely on any external rules or regulations at all. Even the most devout free-market theorists recognise that property rights need to be clear, public and enforceable, and that generally means law, police, courts and other institutions of the state. Some will actively argue for patent, copyright and other laws protecting intellectual property, but these are themselves significant infringements on market freedoms.

This catalogue merely scratches the surface. In fact, there are many things that generally cannot be legally bought and sold at all: people, body parts, hard drugs, votes, court decisions, public qualifications, the outcome of sporting contests. Then there are items that in many countries can only be sold under licence: guns, alcohol, and many medicines.

There are regulations on who is allowed to work: on child labour, on immigration, on the professions and the qualifications needed to enter them. There are regulations on organisational form: companies, associations, partnerships, mutuals, cooperatives, employee-owned firms, charities. There are entry requirements for some industries, such as tests on ownership, capital and track record in banking.

And then there are rules on product safety, on weights and measures and on conditions of trade, such as the right to a refund. The global foreign exchange markets are often thought of as the nearest thing to a perfectly free market. It is true that they are astonishingly large and astonishingly liquid. The Bank for International Settlements estimated, for example, that trading averaged $5.1 trillion a day in April 2016. Yet they are also very closely bound by rules and regulations.

Myth 2 concerns how markets function. Markets are far from identical to each other, and do not all operate to a single equilibrating mechanism. Markets for food products are very different from asset markets; financial markets differ radically from labour markets; markets in primary goods are different from secondary or resale markets in those goods.

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To take a few examples: in product markets, buyers know fairly precisely what they are getting in advance. This is not the case in labour markets, despite the best efforts of recruitment consultants. In financial markets, the edge for participants generally lies not in serving some need in the real economy, but in knowing what their competitors are doing and second-guessing them.

The British housing market has evolved into a form of proxy savings vehicle in which price inflation, far from being despised, is actively welcomed by owners keen to see their properties increase in value. The owners’ reliance on mortgage finance makes them preternaturally sensitive to interest-rate changes, conditioning both domestic politics and central bank monetary policy. The German housing market, by contrast, is dominated by rental and leasehold properties, reducing both political tolerance of and economic exposure to house price inflation.

Myth 3 is about culture. Markets shape our lives, our homes, our possessions – even the music we listen to. And yet, they do much more that this. They shape our expectations of others, our manners and our capacity to trust, and those things in turn shape them.

Markets are not merely antiseptic objects of expert study, or neutral tools of public policy. The people who trade in them are not economic automata operating purely in accordance with financial incentives. On the contrary, markets are subject to ‘animal spirits’. These are the human passions of confidence or pessimism in the face of the unknown, as well as the human instinct to be moved by stories and narratives, and to react to unfairness or corruption.

In sum, markets constitute a created, constructed order. Of course, foolish government interventions can undermine or even destroy markets. But far from being intrinsically opposed, states and markets rely on and benefit from each other. Indeed, they rely on each other more and more today, as competition increases pressure on public resources, private property rights become more contested, and globalisation drives the need for enforceable international standards.

The old bromide that “the private sector makes the money and the public sector spends it” misses a deeper and more interesting truth: that both require each other to function effectively. To take a recent example: the Space Industry Act 2018 sets out law to enable a person or company to put a private satellite in space from a UK launch site, and to cap their liability. The result is expected to be a new era of British space entrepreneurship — all made possible by an Act of Parliament.

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What does this mean? As an ideology, neoliberalism is dead. Meanwhile, the debate we as a society need to have – the debate about what markets are and should be for, about the limitations of the idea of ‘market failure’ and the role of the state – has been left by the wayside.

Modern technology has brought with it rapidly increasing complexity in markets, as choices proliferate for consumers. Public attention has rightly focused so far on the use of intra-company transfer pricing and other devices to reduce tax payments to a minimum, and on escalating concerns about privacy and the manipulation of public opinion. But we also need to think again about competition policy.

Companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook enjoy gigantic and increasing asymmetries of power and information versus the individual consumer. These asymmetries allow them the scope to exploit their consumers, both in specific segments, in groups, or individually in ways that run counter to established norms of fair dealing and justice.

These businesses are modern titans which bestride their markets as completely as did the old oil and railway trusts. They are hard for government or regulators to scrutinise, because they are closed systems. But at the same time their status as networks means the normal armoury of regulatory tools against market monopoly or oligopoly is far less effective.

In due course, the world will need to have a deep debate about the astonishing power, and the astonishing absence of accountability, of the technology platforms. But in the meantime, we can look at competition policy. More transparency and disclosure are a prerequisite in this regard, yet markets all being different from one another, different levers will be needed to achieve it.

The Standard Oil Company was broken up after 1911 under the Sherman Act into a host of smaller (but still enormous) oil and gas companies, including what would become Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, Mobil, Amoco and Sohio (the latter two later bought by BP).

Few if any people seriously believe that Google could be effectively broken up into different regional or business units, or that to do so would generate economic value. But that approach might work better for Amazon, with a split between its marketplace and product provider functions, and national or regional services working from a common back office but competing against each other in the marketplace.

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As for Google and Facebook, we can lift an idea developed by the father of economics and social psychology, Adam Smith. Human shoppers can be supported by new algorithmic consumers – that is, by pieces of software able to compare and contrast different offers in the digital marketplace and make choices on the human’s behalf.

Imagine trying to choose the best home insurance in such a world, instead of poring for hours over dozens of sites and hundreds of products, or using potentially costly price-comparison sites. You could have your personal online assistant do it for you, in its own time and using networked computational power.

Over time, such online assistants are likely to become commonplace; still more so if data comes to be seen as a public good created by individuals, rather than simply accumulated by companies. These digital agents could, in principle, make automatic purchases subject to individual guidelines, negotiate transactions, and even build coalitions with other digital consumers automatically in order to get keener prices or elicit new products.

There is no reason why an array of new businesses should not emerge to enable this levelling of the playing field to take place. They will require coordinated regulatory intervention, but there is no reason to think that any of this is technically, economically or politically impossible.

These ideas come from recognising the limitations of free-market rhetoric, grasping the possibilities offered by a really deep understanding of markets, and pushing hard for more, and more effective, competition. They can potentially set the new trading and trust-busting standards of the digital future.