by 
The
ever-mounting
hysteria
over
Elon
Musk’s
Department
of
Government
Efficiency
(DOGE)
seems
to
largely
be
coming
from
that
large
sector
of
Americans
who
work
for,
or
in
other
ways
feed
from,
Washington’s
seemingly
bottomless
trough.
As
government
employment
and
spending
have
cascaded
in
recent
years,
this
has
created
not
so
much
a
‘deep
state’,
as
the
right-wing
paranoids
suspect,
but
a
huge
and
expanding
protected
class
of
people
who
are
anxious
to
defend
their
livelihoods.
Most
anti-DOGE
jeremiads
avoid
questions
of
class
or
self-interest.
Predictable
Democratic
allies,
like
the
Atlantic,
accuse
Musk
of
presiding
over
a
‘reign
of
ineptitude’
and
waging
war
on
defenseless
civil
servants.
Some
suggest
that
this
reflects
a
deep-seated
desire
by
GOP
neanderthals
to
remove
objective
‘empiricists’
from
Washington
–
presumably
the
same
‘experts’
who
led
the
nation
into
mounting
debt,
high
inflation,
increasing
class
divisions
and
a
chronic
inability
to
get
things
built
at
reasonable
cost.
Many
have
resorted
to
the
tired,
old
‘fascist’
meme.
Anne
Applebaum
sees
Musk’s
disruption
of
the
federal
bureaucracy
as
nothing
less
than
the
arrival
of
authoritarian
‘regime
change’.
As
if
auditing
the
bureaucracy
is
now
the
first
step
towards
totalitarianism.
Even
some
populist
conservatives
have
warned
that
the
fallout
from
DOGE’s
cuts
will
ultimately
harm
vulnerable
working-class
people
the
most.
The
class
dynamics
at
play
in
DOGE
are
not
as
straightforward
as
some
would
have
it.
It’s
not
simply
a
case
of
Musk,
the
billionaire
oligarch,
ruthlessly
attacking
the
lowly
administrator.
The
impetus
for
DOGE
is
primarily
driven
by
a
conflict
within
the
middle
class.
On
one
side
are
public
workers
whose
pay,
and
pensions,
well
exceed
those
in
the
private
sector.
On
the
other,
there
are
millions
who
pay
tax
and
feel
harassed
by
regulations,
particularly
among
Trump’s
base
of
small
business
owners.
Millions
of
middle-
and
working-class
families
not
sucking
the
federal
teat
are
falling
ever
behind
the
affluent
elites,
who
seem
to
control
the
state
whichever
party
is
in
power.
Throughout
the
Biden
years,
government
employment
and
related
sectors,
notably
in
health
services,
have
emerged
as
the
only
consistently
growing
high-wage
sectors,
a
pattern
evident
both
in
the
last
month
of
his
administration
and
Trump’s
first.
In
contrast,
material
sectors,
like
manufacturing
and
mining,
have
slumped.
In
the
first
three
years
of
Biden’s
presidency,
the
ranks
of
government
workers,
at
all
levels,
expanded
by
1.5million.
In
2024,
the
federal
government
reached
its
highest
worker
count
in
two
decades.
President
Biden’s
budget
for
2025,
signed
in
March
last
year,
envisaged
total
spending
to
be
more
than
60
per
cent
higher
than
it
was
in
2019.
This
public-spending
surge
has
sparked
the
growth
of
a
‘new
class’,
to
adapt
former
Yugoslav
communist
theoretician
Milovan
Djilas’s
term
for
the
elite
bureaucrats
of
the
Soviet
system.
Another
useful
analogy
is
the
‘clerisy’.
Indeed,
America’s
version
operates
much
as
the
pre-revolutionary
French
clergy
did.
This
was
a
powerful
and
protected
segment
of
society,
but
it
was
not
monolithic.
It
had
its
bishops,
but
also
parish
priests,
who
often
barely
lived
any
better
than
their
parishioners.
Read
the
rest
of
this
piece
at
Spiked.
Joel
Kotkin
is
the
author
of
The
Coming
of
Neo-Feudalism:
A
Warning
to
the
Global
Middle
Class.
He
is
the
Roger
Hobbs
Presidential
Fellow
in
Urban
Futures
at
Chapman
University
and
and
directs
the
Center
for
Demographics
and
Policy
there.
He
is
Senior
Research
Fellow
at
the
Civitas
Institute
at
the
University
of
Texas
in
Austin.
Learn
more
at
joelkotkin.com
and
follow
him
on
Twitter
@joelkotkin.
Photo:
FMT
under
CC
4.0
License.
Go to Source
Author: Joel Kotkin
