Considering how much time and energy Elon Musk has put into impressing us all with his brilliance it’s surprising how gleefully he’s embraced the opportunity to prove how stupid he is.
Let’s say we accept that government bureaucracy is bloated and inefficient. It’s not surprising; it’s also not the work of some nefarious “deep state.” It’s a pretty normal progression for government bureaucracy, everywhere and forever. It would be great if it were streamlined and more efficient. It would be a massive project, and doing a decent job of it would start with extensive study, looking at bottlenecks, inefficiencies, areas of needless overlap and duplication and so forth. The next step would involve an awful lot of careful thought and planning before even starting to make necessary changes — plus arguably having the proposed changes approved by Congress. That hardly describes the Musk approach.
Aside from the impulsive “shoot from the hip” approach he’s used, the blanket firings demonstrate the kind of blindness we expect — and accept — from management: the presumption that employees are a homogeneous quantity. His reasoning seems to be that if enough people are fired the remaining workforce — thoroughly demoralized and devalued, — will step up and get the same amount of work done. The lack of regard for relative quality of individual workers is totally clear. As far as he’s concerned, a peon is a peon. They’re disposable and interchangeable.
I have enough experience in the workforce to know there’s quite a range in quality. There will always be a few excellent workers, and about the same number who are pretty unproductive. The rest fall in between. It’s incredibly stupid to fire the good ones. Any good administrator understands this. Musk doesn’t.
Donald Trump doesn’t either. To him a good employee at least pretends to worship Donald Trump and does whatever Trump asks—and is also expendable at the least provocation. This is the autocrat mindset, pure and simple.
There may be a deeper agenda here—to create the chaos necessary to insist on even more drastic measures. If we reach and pass that point it probably will be too late.
It’s already been said that everything Trump has done in his second term so far is straight out of the dictator’s playbook. It’s the truth. It just hasn’t been said often enough or by enough people. The big question is, will it be left to the judgement of history to deliver that verdict, or will we see it for what it is in time to stop it?
Musk and Trump together have already made one thing crystal clear: They believe the world should be run by rich white men. They don’t see this as racist or sexist; in their minds it’s only realism. They genuinely believe that white people are smarter than non-whites, that men are smarter than women—and that rich white men are smartest of all. His base needs to come to grips with that part. If you’re not smart enough to be rich you’re just another loser to be taken advantage of. The worldview they adopt is that you take advantage of anyone stupid enough to be vulnerable. This mindset has given us the world we have today. Is it a good world? Have rich white men done a good job?
The Trump phenomenon has some historical precedent. Powerful right-wing forces have used popular anger to bring a ‘sympathetic dictator’ to power. That might not work out exactly as they expect—because Trump’s sympathies don’t extend beyond his own pocketbook. His desire for dictatorship is painfully obvious in his selections to lead specific departments. He’s filled them with toadies who will do his bidding—and Republicans in Congress are so terrified of losing their seats if they stand up to him that they offer no resistance to these absurd appointments. This is not going to change until people realize the only thing this leads to is accelerating the perpetual process of moving wealth from the bottom of the economy to the top. The wealthy will benefit. The rest of us are just losers to be taken advantage of. In this mindset that’s exactly how it should work. They and all the other megalomaniacs believe in the soundness of their version of reality.
It’s true the Democratic Party shares the blame for the situation by having been a perfect foil for his strategy, but there’s nothing to be gained by assigning blame. It’s too late for that; by now that’s only a counterproductive distraction. This is serious. We need intelligent, even inspirational leadership. We need a better mindset than we’ve found so far. Will we? You’d need a crystal ball for an answer to that. So far Trump’s shock-and-awe blitzkrieg has worked exactly as planned: too much, too fast and threateningly drastic enough to keep adversaries completely off balance, happy to accept minuscule concessions (like giving up on Matt Gaetz as Attorney General: are you kidding? So then we accept the other bozos?) as an excuse for believing it’s not really as sinister as it looks.
I’ve said nothing here that hasn’t been said before, but it needs to be said, over and over again, until the message gets through. If we fail to get that message in time, history books of the future will render judgement.
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