DOGE

Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen has made his first public statement on the problem & opportunity presented by the Department of Gov’t Efficiency in saving America from death by bureaucracy & debt in an interview with the most winsome man in media, Peter Robinson. Oddly enough, Robinson was depressed throughout most of the conversation, since America today isn’t what it was in Reagan’s day, whereas Andreessen was chipper!

I confess a certain surprise—I have not seen anyone in politics or media or among intellectuals yet come alive with excitement, plans, & proposals for DOGE. Are conservatives dead intellectually or politically? How do not people see that this is a historic opportunity?

Andreessen shows a few important things. First, he’s aware of how bad the problem facing America is. Internationally, America is facing China, its first peer rival since the British Empire, which, however, wasn’t a danger to America after the War of 1812. War, of course, should be avoided & seems avoidable in the normal course of things. But whether America retains its eminence is in question. At home, America is threatened with bankruptcy at the same moment that the social conditions of civil tranquility, the middle class way of life with marriage & children in a home bought by taking on a mortgage, seem impossible to guarantee. So also with the problem of energy—our way of life demands enormous quantities of electricity which we don’t take seriously in any way, not in terms of production, nor storing or transport, never mind the dealing with potential catastrophes. So also with the problem of manufacturing essential goods, even national security technology. All these different things go to creating this unique problem in America: America cannot survive without its dependance on the rest of the world, at the moment America is least able & inclined to enforce a tyranny over other countries. So also with the problems of administration—the state is openly inimical to the people & it seems impossible to compel state employees to stop subverting the American way of life.

Second, Andreessen sees in all these problems remarkable opportunities. AI demands a lot of electricity to keep the GPUs running computations—more & more Americans use AI, even if mostly in trivial ways, as a game or a replacement for Google search. These facts, for habits are as much facts as these technological installations, encourage a new interest in energy, which must turn the American mind toward embracing nuclear energy, as well as renewing fossil fuel energy production, all to drive prices down while increasing consumption. The situation we are in encourages us to move in the direction of abundance of cheap energy, in short.

A similar case can be made for other things—a renewed interest in manufacturing, especially but not exclusively in high tech, for reasons of commerce as well as reasons of national security. That connects the autonomy required by our techno-lords to the demand for jobs for middle-class Americans. Both have the blessing of the gov’t, under the banner of making America great again or the new industrial policy, as much to increase state capacity as to improve men’s ability to provide for a wife & children.

To speak more abstractly, the depth of the American crisis finally aligns the interests of enough groups of Americans to make possible an electoral coalition, a governing class, & a national agreement on what’s urgent. It’s possible therefore to put citizens above foreigners when it comes to immigration. It’s also possible to put work above ideology, since the wealthy as much as the ordinary citizens can understand that only economic growth can solve the problem of the deficits, debt, & therefore the burden of taxes, regulations, & the various kinds of threats the state levels as surely against ordinary dissenting conservatives as against Elon Musk’s various companies.

DOGE matters because it’s the first time in generations that the most intelligent class of workers in America applies itself to reforming gov’t. If Trump stands for the consent of the governed, it’s Elon, Andreessen, David Sacks, & others like them who stand for the competence to govern. Should this project succeed, it would remove much of the harmful incompetence of the state, as well as much of the opportunities for corruption concealed in it; it would discredit the collegiate class as administrators & break the institutional deadlock of the last generation or two. Tech billionaires really are better administrators than lawyers & activists, never mind the permanent bureaucracy. Americans really like working for a living better than figuring out the intricacies & intrigues of Washington D.C. The offer of much better gov’t at a much lower price is very hard to refuse.