Democrats are losing their sanity over Trump’s reliance on the “unelected” Elon Musk—through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—to drastically downsize the administrative agencies. But it’s funny that none of these critics had such concerns for years and years when the same departments—also run by unelected bureaucrats—were increasing their operations and budgets, completely obscured from the public view and unable to account for billions of dollars of already spent (or lost?) public funds.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think it’s problematic (and, shall we say, “extra-constitutional”) to have someone who is unvetted by the legislature or other democratic mechanism, to have so much control over policy, not to mention access to private data relating to millions of civilians. But that part of the picture is NOT actually new! A faceless, unaccountable bureaucratic machine (the “deep state,” as the dissidents call it) was already exercising “much control over policy” and had unfettered “access to our private data” for a very long time. At least this time around we know who is in charge and is answerable for the results. DOGE is run by a known individual, controlled by an (elected) president, and its activities are publicly acknowledged. Most importantly, the agenda of this unelected bureaucracy, apparently, is to reduce unelected bureaucracies. So, it seems very odd to me that THIS is the point at which so many have suddenly become concerned about unelected bureaucratic power!
Of course, it isn’t just the Democrats whose principles are conveniently stashed away when it conflicts with their interests. MAGA Republicans who have spent years constantly complaining about government interference in the market now insist that the government should get intimately involved. The most common recent complaint has been about “DEI” policies (which favor certain minority groups in academic, professional, and public benefit contexts, ostensibly to combat historical disadvantages). It was supposed to be un-American because of its anticompetitive nature. We’re a nation of self-made, self-reliant people, competing, negotiating, associating, transacting—by our own choice, in a marketplace that is free of the distorting effect of government interference. And we really hate taxes and tariffs, which are nothing short of extortion. At least that’s what we were told by MAGA. But it turns out not to be the case. It turns out fine to thwart competition to favour native born white employees over cheaper and more competent foreign workers with brown skin. It turns out that spurned job candidates and disgruntled ex-employees know better than a company’s management what the company’s labour needs are! Those are “our jobs” by right! Companies OWE it to the “community” to provide employment at high-wages and NEVER let foreign competition drive down labor prices! A short time ago, such ideas were considered commie and un-American. But here we are.
This ability to live with cognitive dissonance when it suits one’s political interests is certainly not new. It’s just getting more and more transparent, for some reason. I think the personality of Donald Trump has a lot to do with it. Before him, politicians and politically inclined people were hypocritical, but they assumed that their hypocrisy had to be hidden because the general public would find it unacceptable. I think Trump figured out that, to a large enough portion of the people, principles really don’t matter. Their own interests matter. He figured out that if you seem authentic and, on THEIR side, they don’t care how hypocritical or unprincipled you actually are. In fact, being zealously and ruthlessly on their side is actually a winning strategy!
But, while he turned it into an overt selling point, Trump didn’t invent this game. Like I said, it’s been around. I started noticing the trend during the early Obama years. Right before he was elected, liberals and leftists had voiced extreme alarm at the Bush administration’s extra-constitutional power grabs: extraordinary rendition (the practice of detaining people outside the jurisdiction of the United States, without judicial oversight, and holding them indefinitely, sometimes in a third country, without trial); warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of civilians and their communication records (obtained from phone companies without the targets’ knowledge); enhanced interrogation methods (aka torture) used by military and intelligence personnel against detainees; starting and intensifying wars with no clear nexus between the justification and the engagement, etc. Much of this (and more) was made “legal” by the euphemistically named statute “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001.” The “appropriate tools” that it gave to the government were staggering new powers the constitution never contemplated… but who was going to stop them? And that’s just on the “security” side of the equation. The economic policies (like bailing out Wall Street banks that caused an economic collapse at the expense of the American taxpayers who were the victims of that collapse, etc.) were also ruthless, and condemned as such by liberals and leftists.
Then, Obama became president, elected largely on a platform of weeding out these kinds of abuses. But he proceeded to go about business as usual. If anything, he ratcheted things up. The corporate handouts were justified by “economic reality.” The security-surveillance state became a fact of life that the government didn’t even try to justify anymore. They did what they did, because they could. Technological advances gave Obama more powerful tools than what Bush had access to. Improved connectivity, more accurate GPS tracking, nano technology, precision drones, the internet of things—and let’s not forget social media, where people unwittingly make it possible to monitor their lives near-constantly. So, how did the aforementioned liberals and leftists react? A few prominent exceptions aside, they mostly just shrugged it off. I was one of the Obama voters who felt disillusioned by all this, but I was taken aback by the multitudes who let him off the hook. I asked many people about this, trying to understand their perspective. The answer I got most frequently is that governing in the real world requires some compromise and pragmatism. Pure idealism doesn’t work. Presidents learn that on the job—they have dilemmas we can’t even imagine.
Fair enough. But if this is true, didn’t President Bush deserve the same latitude? Why was he spoken of as a war criminal for doing the things for which we were now supposed to defer to President Obama’s judgment? I’ve asked this question many times throughout the Obama era and only twice did I get what seemed like a genuine answer. One friend of mine admitted he had been wrong to be inconsistent and needed to rethink things (thereby increasing my respect for him tenfold). The other person whose answer I thought was honest (though more frightening) said to me “I don’t know, I guess I just trust Obama more. I feel like he would only do those things if there was a good reason.” In other words, this person was admitting her judgments were based on personal bias and she didn’t care.
The Republicans and right-leaning Americans seemed to have the exact same reflex (going in the opposite direction on the details, of course). During Bush’s presidency, none of the aforementioned abuses seemed problematic to them. Everything was about “national security” or “American interests” and accusing the Bush Administration’s critics of being unpatriotic. They threw around the word “treason” for even questioning the president. The term “Commander in Chief” became an everyday utterance. But when their president was Barack Obama, the same folks seemed to do a complete about face on every position. The Patriot Act was now a tool of tyranny. True patriotism no longer required allegiance to the commander in chief! In fact, this kind of worshipful attitude is anathema to American patriotism! They suddenly remembered we are a nation built on the ideal of individual freedom and skepticism about governmental power. Constantly opposing and berating the president became the new stamp of “true” Americanness.
That cycle of flip-flopping was repeated again during the Trump and Biden administrations and the trend has increasingly intensified. During the Covid lockdowns it became crystal clear that any position can be spun for or against “your side” depending on who is advocating it. We were told large gatherings were Covid super-spreader events… except for Black Lives Matter protest events. It wasn’t clear why—or HOW—the virus distinguished between gatherings for different purposes. But that’s what we were supposed to accept. Because “believe the science!” (and “science” was whatever the government scientists told you). On the other side, there were people asserting a “right” to go into a store without masks on, even if the store owner required it. But these were the same people who usually insist that a business owner should have the right to make his/her own rules and that nobody has a “right” to be served by an unwilling private business. A few years earlier, they argued that a bakery should be allowed to refuse to make a “gay wedding cake,” because the owner had a right to his own values and because the gay couple could always go to a different baker. The examples are endless.
It’s probably not a particularly surprising insight that most people claim to have principles but they seem to apply them only when it suits their own interests to do so. What’s surprising is how overt and shameless the practice has become.