Musk and Trump Are Cutting Popular Programs. That’s Deliberate.

Most likely, their popularity is precisely what the Trump-Musk administration dislikes about them. For anti-government ideologues, it’s important that people not have good experiences with the government. Every clean energy investment in your community, every Social Security check, every child enrolled in Head Start, every improvement in air and water quality, is a threat to right-wing ideological dominance. They know it, and they want to stop Americans from having those positive associations.

In Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time, the conservative elements in business class hated the New Deal—which was so popular that FDR was elected three times—for the same reason. They knew that it would give rise to generations of Americans who felt fondly about the government programs that had fed their hungry families during the Depression, put their unemployed young people to work, andbuilt beautiful public buildings and parks. The ruling class began mobilizing against the New Deal’s most beloved programs; an industry group called the Liberty League, as historian Kim Phillips-Fein wrote in her 2009 book, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan, “took special pleasure in attacking Social Security.” And while some business interests used popular persuasion to try to fight what they saw as essentially a socialist consensus—using radio, billboards, and newspaper editorials to evangelize about “free enterprise”—many realized they couldn’t win that way. Instead, they relied instead on court challenges to labor protections and prepared for class conflict by stockpiling tear gas and machines in their factories. Like our current-day oligarchs, most New Deal opponents didn’t expect to win what they wanted through the democratic process.

The ruling class of the 1930s and ’40s would have loved to be in Elon Musk’s position. Although he and his young minions may seem merely like nihilistic psychos, they’re also conservatives doing something that makes rational sense for their political movement. By going after the most popular government programs, they are thinking long-term, planning for a world where no one defends government agencies because these agencies don’t do anything that we value. Elon Musk isn’t just trying to bypass all checks and balances, ignore popular will, plunder our public goods, and wreck the world, though he is doing all that. As we protest this vandalism, we need to remember that he aims to build a future in which we have nothing left to defend.