You Are the "Inefficiency"

Forget the "47%" - now nearly all of us are contemptible moochers whose lives are too inconsequential to worry about.

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Donald Trump and Elon Musk want many things. They want attention, and power, and money, and praise and respect. Trump still craves acceptance by the Manhattan brahmins who looked down their noses at a vulgar striver from Queens like him; Musk yearns to be seen as cool by young people. But as they set about destroying the United States government, there is one central motivation that drives them, one that can get lost in all the chaos they are very intentionally creating.

It’s as old as any of our political memories, a liberal/conservative divide so basic as to seem banal. The details may be new, but Trump 2.0 is yet another attack by the super-rich against everyone else. The bad-faith justifications have changed, the means are more brutal and the target populations more broad. But the effect is the same: They believe that there is a small number of people who matter, and a great mass of people who deserve nothing.

What kind of “efficiency” are we talking about?

Ask yourself this question: Why is Elon Musk doing what he’s doing? The answer Republicans would probably give is that because Musk is so selfless, he decided to devote his boundless genius to the project of government reform, to make government more efficient so it would work better for all of us. They might even be able to say that without laughing.

But absolutely nothing in what Musk has done to date shows even the slightest interest in “efficiency.” If you thought an agency was operating inefficiently, you might audit the books, examine all the programs, and look for systems that could be streamlined or paperwork that could be reduced, always keeping in mind the mission of the agency to make sure that its goals could be accomplished even as changes were made.

You would not, if you were seeking efficiency, send a bunch of 20-something douchebros with zero knowledge of government into that agency to screw around with its electronic systems, then put every worker on indefinite leave and cease all its operations. You would not just fire everyone who had been working there less than a year with zero regard to what jobs they were doing or how well they were doing them. That’s about as “efficient” as having your 8-year-old clean up their room with a flamethrower.

So when Musk says “we do need to delete entire agencies,” which agencies is he talking about? Some of them are places that might exercise meaningful oversight over his copious government contracts and business activities, but most of them are, quite simply, in the business of helping people. And by “people” I mean the 99.99% of us who are not ultrawealthy. It’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects people from financial scams. The Agency for International Development, which sends food and medicine overseas. The NIH, which funds research to cure diseases. The EPA, which stops industry from poisoning our air and water. The Department of Education, which provides student loans to people who can’t afford college on their own.

Not that the ultrawealthy don’t rely on government too — they absolutely do — but they often do so in less direct ways, and certainly believe that as masters of the universe they move through a world they made with their own skill and determination.

But wait, you say — doesn’t Trump soak up the affection of the blue-collar voters who came through for him in such great numbers? Wasn’t he the one who said “I love the poorly educated”? Indeed. But he loves them only for what they deliver to him: their votes, their ongoing support, their willingness to threaten and punish whomever he tells them is their enemy. He does not, however, love them enough to help them in any way.

The new “47%”

Ezra Klein recently noted that Musk and his online minions often refer to liberals as NPCs, or nonplayer characters, a video game term referring to the figures who populate the background of games. This insult is extremely revealing, but Klein seems to have misunderstood its meaning. “NPCs don’t have minds of their own. They’re automatons. They do as they’re told,” he wrote. “Liberals, in this story, thought what they were allowed to think, said what they were allowed to say.” But that’s not what it means when Elon Musk and his followers call people NPCs.

What they actually mean is that as they see it, most of humanity is simply not human. We are ants, or even less: bits of programming to be moved around at Elon’s whim. Only he and the people who aspire to be like him are actors, decision-makers, molding the world to conform to their bold interplanetary vision.

Any suffering he brings down on NPCs is meaningless, because to him our lives are without real meaning. Fire thousands of federal workers, cut off vital services — who cares? Those people don’t matter. As one federal worker put it in a subreddit where fired workers by the hundreds are sharing their stories, “The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I make $50k a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.”

Here’s something Musk recently tweeted:

If you are affected by the slashing of a government program, that means you’re a parasite.

For all its techno-gloss, this contempt for ordinary people is deeply familiar. The difference now is in how few Americans are exempted from that contempt, and how unapologetic it is.

Let’s take a quick trip back in time. In September 2012, Mother Jones released a secretly recorded video in which Mitt Romney told a group of rich donors at a fundraiser that 47% of Americans would vote for President Obama “no matter what” because they were part of a detestable moocher class, those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” Though it was nothing different than what you could hear every day on conservative talk radio or Fox News, it created such an outpouring of criticism that Romney was forced to offer a sort-of-apology, saying “I said something that’s just completely wrong.”

By then Romney had chosen for his running mate one Paul Ryan, an acolyte of Ayn Rand whose belief in her philosophy of unapologetic selfishness and disdain for the little people was so fervent that as he once said, “I grew up reading Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.”

“Parasites” or “takers,” the perspective is the same. Ryan was never able to achieve his dream of eviscerating the social safety net; again and again, his own party recoiled from the political danger inherent in his slash-and-burn budget blueprints. But now he may get his wish.

And we must keep confronting the administration with these questions: What is this “efficiency” Trump and Musk are giving us, and what is its true goal? Do they want to deliver services more effectively and create more broadly shared prosperity? Or are they just trying to cripple government so all that’s left is a vehicle to advance the interests of people like them, while the other 99.99% of us are told to go to hell?