Musk's Hyper-McCarthyism

Don't Take Any of This At Face Value

One thing I argue about with friends and myself is just how much this is pure chaos and how much of it is part of a grand ideological design in the mind of its authors. Sensible people accustomed to the real world, who themselves are not very ideologically rigid, view explanations based on ideas that rely on small cadres of trained ideologues carrying out a master plan, to be unconvincing on the face of it: it creates an all-too-neat universe that mirrors that of ideological thought and even approaches conspiracy theory. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” they say. But when Hamlet said that, he’d just seen a ghost. I also keep seeing spirits: those of Murray Rothbard, Samuel T. Francis, and Joe McCarthy.

I’m willing to hazard that there is just about nothing—yes, nothing—that Trump and Musk are doing that was not already dreamt up in the philosophies of Rothbard and Francis. Whether it’s come to pass by their court intellectuals’ reading, some structural analogy between the movements to its forebears, or even demonic possession, it kind of doesn’t matter: it’s all there.

Consider “DOGE:” This is exactly the kind of wholesale attack on the state that the anarcho-capitalist Rothbard envisioned and desired. And consider the methods: the public smearing of civil servants and their agencies with misleading or downright false “revelations.” This corresponds precisely to Rothbard’s recommended adoption of McCarthyism as a political technique. What Rothbard understood was that McCarthy was undertaking not an attack on Communists so much as an attack on liberalism and institutions, as he writes in his Betrayal of the American Right:

…I myself was a McCarthy enthusiast. There were two basic reasons. One was that while McCarthy was employing the weapon of a governmental committee, the great bulk of his victims were not private citizens but government officials: bureaucrats and Army officers. Most of McCarthy’s red-baiting was therefore “voluntary” rather than “compulsory,” since the persons being attacked were, as government officials, fair game from the libertarian point of view. Besides, day in and day out, such Establishment organs as the New York Times kept telling us that McCarthy was “tearing down the morale of the executive branch”; what more could a libertarian hope for?

He goes on to analyze the inner meaning of McCarthy:

…that there was a vital need to appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the Establishment: of the Ivy League, the mass media, the liberal intellectuals, of the Republican-Democrat political party structure. This appeal could be done—especially in that period of no organized opposition whatever—only by a charismatic leader, a leader who could make a direct appeal to the masses and thereby undercut the ruling and opinion-molding elite; in sum, by a populist short-circuit. It seemed to me that this was what McCarthy was trying to do; and that it was largely this appeal, the openended sense that there was no audacity of which McCarthy was not capable, that frightened the liberals, who, from their opposite side of the fence, also saw that the only danger to their rule was in just such a whipping up of populist emotions.

My own quip at the time, which roughly summed up this position, was that in contrast to the liberals, who approved of McCarthy’s “ends” (ouster of Communists from offices and jobs) but disapproved of his radical and demagogic means, I myself approved his means (radical assault on the nation’s power structure) but not necessarily his ends.

Today, there is a similar response to Musk and Trump’s bureaucratic purges. Some say, “Well, there is probably corruption, and we don’t like DEI stuff, but this isn’t the right way to do it.” But this is exactly the point: it’s an attack on the United States government itself on behalf of a radical libertarian project. If you look at the accompanying “theories” cooked up by the right-wing propaganda machine on X they are all just rehashes of old John Birch Society fever dreams: the left and liberalism are just a conspiracy sustained by the CIA and USAID, a kind of tumor you can cut out of the virtuous American volk.

As Landon Storrs has pointed out in her book The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the American Left, the isolation and destruction of those in government with social democratic and social liberal views was the point:

…many of the accused were neither mainstream liberals, as early critics of the loyalty program maintained, nor Communist Party members (much less Soviet spies). Rather, they were a varied group of leftists who shared a commitment to building a comprehensive welfare state that blended central planning with grassroots democracy. Some called themselves social democrats, some belonged to the Socialist Party, and others resisted categorization, but they agreed that economic and technological development had created interdependences among people and among nations that rendered the ideologies of individualism and nationalism obsolete and even dangerous. As internationalists, they sought to use the social policies of other nations as models and to apply American resources to reduce inequalities and promote peace abroad. The power of these leftists was never uncontested, but their expertise, commitment, and connectedness gave them strength beyond their numbers. Before loyalty investigations pushed this cohort either out of government or toward the center of the political spectrum, the transformative potential of the New Deal was greater than is commonly understood.

Make no mistake: This is also a deliberate attack on the New Deal state and its heirs. And it was so conceived to be.

As Adam Johnson has correctly pointed out, the media must stop taking at face-value claims about “efficiency” or “fraud” or trying to fact-check them piecemeal. Of course, there will be bloat and even malfeasance. But that is all just a pretext. Like the “stolen election,” they are not lies, so much as ideological myths: the underlying belief structure that what the US government does is illegitimate, or rather, that its legitimacy or illegitimacy is up to Musk to decide by fiat.

According to Rothbard’s analysis, McCarthyism failed because it lacked an organized basis:

The short-run collapse of the McCarthy movement was clearly due, furthermore, to the lack of any sort of McCarthyite organization. There were leaders, there was press support, there was a large mass base, but there were no channels of organization, no intermediary links, either in journals of opinion or of more direct popular organizations, between the leaders and the base.

Musk is trying to use X as a substitute or alternate mass constituency to propagandize his cause and gather support. Dozens, if not hundreds, of intermediary links justify or defend his actions. Now, the right-wing media class is suffused with the same paranoiac, conspiratorial mindset and essentially approves of what he’s doing, even if it might offer some dissents here and there about the means or method. But this is still mostly in the right-wing echo chamber of Twitter. The legacy media need not offer its help to legitimate this dangerous and insane ideological power grab. And it should call it what it is.