Table of Contents
The theme chosen by the anti-Trump protesters who took to the streets on April 5 — “Hands Off” — was considered vague even by sympathetic observers and gave rise to a number of interesting questions, such as: “Which hands?” and “Off what — or whom?”
In the favored interpretation, the hands belonged to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and the object of desire was the pristine body of the federal bureaucracy.
The protesting hordes, apparently, wanted to keep the government just the way it is.
There is, I have observed, a peculiar variety of liberal conservatism that insists nothing must ever change — the ecology must remain untouched and the cities must remain undeveloped in this best of all possible worlds.
Progressivism, once a revolutionary faith, has evolved into your elderly grandmother, confused by the bustle of modern life and afraid of the new. Government, from the progressive perspective, exists to freeze society and nature into a comfy stasis.
Only genders are allowed fluidity. Everything else, very much including government, is “settled science,” fixed for all time.
A couple of catchphrases were thrown around at the time of Barack Obama’s presidency to explain the inviolability of government.
One was “Government is the name of the things we do together,” which, if true, would confirm my long-held belief that every baseball team is the equivalent of an independent state.
Another was “You didn’t build that” — implying the government actually built everything — further implying a universe in which NASA bailed out Musk’s SpaceX rather than, as we imagined, the other way around.
Vaudevillian failures
When it comes to government, the Obama era might as well be the Neolithic. Today the slick slogans work only as laugh lines: We know too much.
We know government from the outside as the clattering suit of armor worn, during four madcap years, by a senile president.
We are learning about it from the inside because DOGE has jumped down the rabbit hole, audited Wonderland, and revealed how taxpayer dollars are dispensed by those bureaucratic pranksters, Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Did the government of the United States, conqueror in two world wars and a Cold War, first to place humanity on the moon, really fund transgender comic books in Peru?
The point is contested, but it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the question.
Post-Biden and post-DOGE, government has morphed into comedy. Its failures have an air of vaudeville about them — a series of hilarious pratfalls on center stage by pompous and clueless officials.
The debate no longer centers around whether government is responsible for building everything but whether it can build anything at all.
And there’s an unexpected twist: Some frustrated progressives are joining in the laughter.
Two prominent intellectuals of the left (as the French like to say), Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, have authored a fascinating book, “Abundance,” promoting the following notion: Progressive goals are impossible to achieve by progressive means.
To cite one example: Unplugging society from fossil fuels and into renewable energy will remain a pipe dream under the immobile regulatory system so beloved of liberals.
Process — “procedural kludge” is the authors’ term — kills progress. Given this internal contradiction of progressivism, stasis will always win.
In theory, Klein and Thompson are orthodox believers in big government, but in practice their demand for achievement has set them against the helpless beached whale that is government at every level. And while they criticize the poor beast in order to save it, they can’t resist doing so with a snicker.
‘Hard to even talk about’
Klein made his case to Jon Stewart, an actual comic who hosts the semi-funny “The Weekly Show.”
In a riff that went viral on the web, he attempted to explain the 14-step process the Biden administration’s “Build Back Better” bill required of those who wished to bid for a chunk of the $8.7 billion allocated to build EV charging stations.
The steps involve much planning, and mapping, and reviewing, and more planning — including a “five-year action plan” — followed by consultation and challenges from the states, then back to the beginning, so that by Step 7, Stewart’s face was twitching uncontrollably and Klein, as we say, was laughing out loud.
“It’s hard to even talk about this, man,” Klein groaned. “Having submitted their five-year-plans, their letters of intent, Step 7 says the states must submit an initial proposal — an initial proposal . . .”
“And what the [expletive] did they apply for?” Stewart exploded in mock anger.
“It’s very important that I say this,” stated Klein in a rare moment of seriousness. “This was the Biden administration’s own process for its own bill. They wanted this to happen. This is how liberal government works now.”
He went on: “Step 12. States must run a competitive sub-granting process.”
To which Stewart responded with something along the lines of “OMFG . . .”
It was the political equivalent of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine.
It was also a symptom of how radically the political landscape has shifted. The actions of a very progressive administration, assessed by two very progressive individuals, could evoke only laughter over the lunacy of it all.
Whether Klein’s and Thompson’s liberal credentials will protect them from blowback is, I think, a valid question. The traditional response of the fossilized left to those who challenge its dogmas has been crucifixion.
By treating government like a punch line, too, Klein sounded suspiciously like those conniving oligarchs, Musk and DOGE.
In fact, the Klein-Stewart comedy act, performed March 26, had a sequel on the following day — an extended interview of the DOGE leadership team conducted by Bret Baier of Fox News.
The interview made news of a sort by revealing that Musk’s minions weren’t all tattooed Zoomers with nicknames like “Big Balls.” This particular group was composed of super high achievers, including the cofounder of Airbnb, a successful banker, even a rocket scientist.
Air time was taken up with weird and wonderful stories about the federal government — everyone came with some version of “A funny thing happened to me on the way to the DOGE.”
Retirement cave
Here’s a sampler:
“There’s 700 different IT systems today at NIH.”
“There are over 15 million people . . . over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system.”
On the other hand, “there were over $300 million in Small Business Administration loans . . . given out to people under the age of 11.”
“There is actually really only one bank account that’s used to disperse all the monies that go out of the federal government.”
“There are, in the federal government, around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees.”
My personal favorite was the retirement cave story, because it evoked so magnificently Hollywood’s idea about how Washington works.
“It turns out there is actually a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government,” explained Joe Gubbio, the Airbnb cofounder. “Now picture this. This giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked ten high to house over 400 million pieces of paper. It’s a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn’t changed in the last 70 years.”
Baier, who looks like he commutes to Fox from The Shire in “Lord of the Rings,” could never match Stewart in his range of bewildered facial expressions or expletives. He stuck to playing the straight man, but on occasion the comedic nonsense that is our government visibly got to him.
“Time out, time out,” he would say, hoping for a better explanation.
None was available.
Obvious glitch
I find it remarkable that in this supposed age of polarization, we can watch fiercely anti-Trump authors and stolid MAGA loyalists appear during successive days on TV, chortling together about our ridiculous government.
They agree about nothing except one very important thing: The way our nation is run only makes sense if it’s intended as comedy.
What are we to make of this?
I think it’s healthier to mock power than to worship it — it shows that Americans, for all our insufferable trendiness, retain a firm hold on reality.
We look on a monstrous tangle of rules and regulations, enforced by hundreds of agencies and millions of bureaucrats, all of it consuming $6 trillion per year, and we don’t see drama or romance, just a farce — much ado about nothing.
There’s an obvious glitch with this way of thinking, however.
We live in a representative democracy. The rules and regulations were put in place by people we elected. The agencies were created and the bureaucrats appointed by our representatives. The dollars were taken straight out of our pockets by the IRS.
At a certain point, the laughter begins to fade away. The human comedy is of course never quite finished, but in this instance the object of ridicule suddenly appears too close to home.
If we are the government, then the joke is on us.
