Colossal hand and torch “Liberty” (1876) | Centennial Photographic Co., Library of Congress
Editor’s note: In December 2024, Forrest Deacon, a Humanities lecturer at Villanova University who is also completing a dissertation in politics at the New School for Social Research, approached Public Seminar, offering to write a piece about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the time, this seemed like a dramatic new initiative, to be cochaired by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, that President-elect Donald Trump announced with great fanfare shortly after his victory in November.
Like Public Seminar and its current editorial team, Forrest has a special interest in democratic theory.
In the first draft of a possible piece, he used Trump’s initiative, which promised to make the US Government, as never before, “accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE,’ ” as a pretext for opening a conversation about “democratizing” modern democracy (rather than acquiescing in its reduction to what promised to be a spectacle organized by oligarchs acting in the name of an otherwise invisible and nonexistent “people”).
Before we could run the piece, Trump changed his tack, and issued an executive order right after his inauguration, making Elon Musk the sole chair of DOGE.
In this same executive order—like many of the orders so far, it was very carefully worded—Trump described DOGE not as an unprecedented new initiative but merely as a reorganization and revamp of the United States Digital Service: an executive branch agency created a decade ago by former President Barack Obama to help streamline the digital implementation of the Affordable Care Act and its online marketplace, Healthcare.gov.
Still, within days, it was obvious Trump and Musk’s new DOGE was no simple revamp.
Instead, it seemed to serve as a passport for Musk and his associates to have unfettered access to all federal government data—with consequences that were impossible to predict.
In lieu of trying to publish a polished piece, and in a context where DOGE itself has become a moving target, of indeterminate but potentially profound consequence to the functioning or survival of the American administrative state, Forrest and I thought readers instead might want to follow our conversation as it unfolded online.
—James Miller
February 4, 2025, 11:00 a.m.
James Miller: Forrest, the velocity of current events related to DOGE makes it hard for me to know how best to proceed with the very interesting piece you’ve been working on about DOGE, Trump, Musk, and the future of democracy in America. Because Musk is looking more and more like a one-man wrecking ball granted semisovereign powers.
At the same time, American politics seems more and more as if it might be moving into uncharted waters—with a regime still taking shape that appears at first glance, to defy the traditional categories of the Greek political philosophers.
How, in fact, does any of what’s going on square with what Arendt meant when she coined an utterly modern category, namely “totalitarianism”? Is that even an interesting question? I don’t know.
But these days (speaking only for myself, as a worried and disenchanted former advocate for more participatory forms of modern democracy), simply consulting my well-thumbed personal breviary of prayers for giving more power to the people seems a dereliction.
Forrest Deacon: I am right there with you regarding DOGE, Musk/Trump, the constant deluge of transgressions, what to write, how to think, what to do, the whole lot of it.
The motivated democrat in me looks at the turn of events and wants to really think through alternatives to the system that Trump and Musk have hijacked. Can the Paris Commune’s mix of tactics—the “exacerbated republicanism” of its participants, the use of recall and direct instruction for representatives, the fusion of the legislative and executive under the “people’s will,” and all those other aspects Karl Marx so eloquently enumerated in The Civil War in France—actually do anything for us right now? Can the framework—that is, “to change the world without taking power”—that the Zapatistas set up in their struggle against NAFTA and the Mexican state’s encroachment on Indigenous practices allow us to practice politics differently under such a threat as DOGE, Trump, and the institutional failings of the system they exploited? Or what about Port Huron’s participatory schema, “left” populism chain of equivalences, Occupy’s prefigurative politics, or Rojava’s democratic confederationalism? The examples abound, but you get the point.
This is, after all, what I came to The New School to think through. This is what my dissertation is on.
But the cynic in me thinks that all this is moot. Do people even care that deeply about what’s going on? Do folks see a way out of this?
The Democratic Party seems tepidly aghast and completely bewildered because the playbook of politics and power they presuppose isn’t in play here.
Most ordinary folks I know appear just as bewildered and even somewhat apathetic.
For example, I am teaching a year-long humanities seminar at Villanova for first-year students, leading a class broadly construed as ancient and modern political thought. I asked my students the other day, as we discussed Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, what they thought about DOGE and Trump and the state of things. It wasn’t a lively conversation, and I mostly got the sense that none of them gave a damn.
Maybe that’s because some of them support what’s happening. Or maybe they’re tired, taken aback, and have just given up.But it didn’t feel great.
So, what’s the point in talking about radical, popular, revolutionary, or whatever kind of democracy in dark times? Are we not experiencing the full extent of what Jacques Rancière, Colin Crouch, Peter Mair, Chantal Mouffe, and the like have sometimes, in despair, called “post-democracy” or “post-politics”?
Are we really stuck with an alienated and utterly impotent citizenry (or “people,” or “mass,” or “demos,” or whatever you want to call it)? Do ordinary people in the current moment have an actionable claim to self-determination and social dignity? Are we as powerless as I feel?
In short, I neither know what to do nor how best to think about what is happening.
Should I continue to look at current events through the lens of popular democracy—as if that were a plausible alternative to the old republican framework of Hamilton and Madison? Do I write about post-democracy, whatever that means in practice? Do I look at this through not only a political destruction of “the people” lens but also a spiritual and existential one? Do I lean into Michel Foucault’s ideas about governmentality, analyzing how DOGE and Trump are attempting to rewrite the code of government and political agency from within this new, emergent nexus of power?
Miller: One key, I think, is to lean into what we don’t know.
Also: What’s new, if anything? What haven’t we seen before (not even in China under Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or in Hungary under Viktor Orbán)?
I personally think it’s important to acknowledge that revolutionary attempts to destroy an administrative state are at the very heart of the classical radical democratic project of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Marx’s project for Communism and the anarchist dream of abolishing the state.
After all, Lenin treated the Paris Commune as if it were an answer to the question “What is to be done?” and then presided over the Soviet experiment, which led, as a figment of rhetoric, to “democratic centralism” and, in practice, not to new political forms devolving power to the people but rather to the dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin in the name of the proletariat.
I mean, Steve Bannon is closer to Lenin than to liberalism, and he knows it. I think that he, no less than Arendt, is fascinated by the possibility of a “new beginning.” So, for that matter, was Arendt’s teacher, Heidegger, who thought Hitler represented one such possibly new beginning in 1933.
But if what Trump and Musk are doing is really new, what is it we are witnessing being born?
Are we in a potentially revolutionary moment of the counter-revolutionary type de Maistre and those who have followed in his footsteps have dreamed about ever since the Fall of the Bastille?
Perhaps we are simply watching a kind of “reality TV” show of executive power, with Trump as an immature, made-for-TV mini-Caesar/mini-Bonaparte issuing endless ostensibly sovereign commands, behaving less like a classical tyrant and more like a child throwing a tantrum, to see if anyone will set any limits on him. (Both, of course, could turn out to be true.)
Honestly, I think the only thing in the short term that might save us from some of our commander-in-chief’s craziest orders is the stock market and its potential to plummet—not Congress. (It also helps to have adults on the world stage, like Claudia Sheinbaum and Justin Trudeau, who also know how to set limits.)
Working through the American courts will take time. I wonder if your students at Villanova aren’t responding in part to Trump’s spectacular attempt to purge the federal government and strike fear into the hearts of any politician—or any group of ordinary citizens—that dares publicly to resist his commands.
Deacon: I appreciate that you raise the similarity between DOGE’s mission of gutting the administrative state and some of the more radical socialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Musk and Trump’s rhetoric sometimes sound eerily like Marx’s refrain that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes,” which Lenin defined in The State and Revolution as “smashing the state.”
What’s missing from Musk and Trump’s movement is, of course, the working class—and, more specifically, regular folks who have supported Trump for the very good reason that they want to “drain the swamp,” thin regulations, curtail government expenditure, trim administrative bloat, and rethink the organization of the modern administrative state.
But what we’re seeing won’t give us that outcome because it isn’t for us: It’s for the tech bros, big business, and the current ruling class led by Trump, who was, after all, duly elected by the American people. As always, ordinary citizens, even if they voted for Trump, will be sidelined.
This brings me to your point about the stock market. I think it’s such a good way to situate where we are and what we’re seeing: the contradictions of what has sometimes been called “democratic capitalism.” As sovereign as Trump thinks he is, as much leeway as he gives Musk, he feels beholden to the market.
Of course, that doesn’t stop Musk and Trump from pretending otherwise.
In one of his endless posts on X early this morning, Musk boasted that DOGE and the MAGA movement will “defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people.” He even called it a “revolution of the people!”
So Musk thinks we’re in a revolutionary moment.
But the revolution I see certainly isn’t “of the people,” and it certainly isn’t “by the people.” In that sense, it’s not really democratic in any meaningful sense.
But could it be?
I think we’re in a moment of profound political potential.
Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1930s, referred to that epoch as an interregnum, in which the foundations of the old (democratic capitalist) order were being destroyed before the foundations of a new order could be secured. Gramsci, of course, took it for granted that Communists would forge this new order.
Elon Musk and Steve Bannon may disagree vehemently about how much power to vest in America’s tech bros, but they are united in their goal of smashing an administrative state built for a century around liberal principles of accountability, meritocracy, and the rule of law.
The question is: What will the rest of us do amid the chaos and destruction?
