The education of a DOGE brownshirt; Class Struggle, Elite Theory, and "Socialisms of Fools"
Reading, Watching 02.16.24
Writing on his substack, one of the members of DOGE has something of a manifesto or proclamation, a personal memoir of his process of radicalization — “Why I Joined DOGE: A Silicon Valley Engineer's Political Awakening.” It sounds like a fairly conventional narrative of the creation of a young right-winger: a growing horror at bullying professors, illiberal left-wing campus protests, the general hypocrisy of liberal elites, and then, crucially, the regime of COVID interventions: “It was never about public health. It was about power. About seeing what people would tolerate and pushing further.” The observation of disaster recovery leads him to a passionate hatred of government waste and bureaucracy: “The federal deficit soared past $34 trillion, but when Americans needed help, they got scraps—if they were lucky. The government had made its choice: Take from Americans. Give to everyone else.” The narrative might seem sincere and even might be sympathetic. Here is a young who would not take it anymore… But observers who know a thing or two about the fringes of the American political scene were immediately struck by this:
My political awakening began with an article in my Freshman year of high school.
It was Our American Pravda by Ron Unz, a piece that laid out, in relentless detail, the sheer scale of media distortion in modern America. Unz wasn’t talking about simple bias—he was describing a press that had systematically buried major scandals, ignored inconvenient facts, and shaped public perception not through lies, but through strategic omission. It was a history of suppression: Communist spies in the Roosevelt administration, the fraudulent case for the Iraq War, financial crimes ignored until they collapsed the economy, and a political class immune to consequences.
That piece appeared in the American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and Taki Theodoracopulos as an outlet for paleoconservatism. (That last character with the Greek name is an open fascist and convicted rapist.) So, it’s clear that his fellow Kliger has been raised on a far-right media diet since he was quite young: He’s an ideologue and he gives it away. This type of story of a gradual awakening and realization is one of the favorite propaganda techniques of the far right, back to well, you know, Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. And speaking of, many people reacted with alarm at the author he cited: Ron Unz.
Unz is one of those strange creatures that once populated the fringes of American politics and letters, but now sadly has taken a more central role. Born into a Jewish family, Unz was a science prodigy, got degrees from Harvard, Stanford, and Cambridge and then worked in the financial world, starting a software firm that made data analytics for Wall Street, making him a wealthy man. In 1994, he tried to primary Governor Pete Wilson. He tried to introduce several ballot initiatives in California and succeeded with one in 1998 that eliminated (for a time) bilingual education. From 2007 until 2013, he was the publisher of The American Conservative, which seems to have survived mostly on his largesse. In 2013, after the revolt of TAC editor Daniel McCarthy, he was “purged,” to use his own words from the publication. Here’s how he describes the incident:
…I asked McCarthy whether he’d yet had a chance to prepare a redlined edit copy of the new article I’d submitted a couple of weeks earlier and on which he’d previously suggested one or two minor changes that I had subsequently made. To my enormous surprise, he informed me that he’d decided to flatly reject the entire piece—an analytical study of American urban crime rates—as representing the sort of racially-inflammatory material that had no place in a quality magazine such as TAC. He instead suggested that a more appropriate venue for my article would be one of the webzines categorized as White Nationalist hate-sites by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
This is one of those many episodes of attempted and unsuccessful policing of the boundaries of the conservative movement by its intellectual class. Unz went on to found a website and a “review” with his name on it. Despite his coming from a Jewish background, Unz’s outlets became a clearinghouse for antisemitic propaganda and Holocaust denial literature, with the excuse that he was publishing suppressed narratives. But it’s very clear what he actually thinks: his own writings praise Henry Ford and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A few points here: First, it’s long been my contention that the Republican staffer class in D.C., from the party to the media is lousy with extreme rightists, a process I’ve called “groyperfication.” This is the second one of these little fuckers revealed to belong to this subculture. Second, here’s an example of the Gold-Brown alliance in action: It’s not so much an alliance as a single movement. As I wrote on Monday, one has to understand that the radical libertarian attack on the liberal state and the fascist attack on the liberal state as structurally and functionally identical: as setting itself against a corrupt, parasitic tumor on the American Volk that must be attacked and removed. I wrote on Friday about the Neo-McCarthyism of Musk’s attack on the federal government. Lo and behold, Kliger says he was first fascinated by Unz’s 2013 piece, which begins with the repetition of the McCarthyite myth of an American government “substantially controlled” by hidden Communist agents.
On the question of antisemitism, I’m pleading with my readers to try to take a structural view. In America, we usually think of racism as a kind of personal prejudice, an ignorant way of thinking that can be unlearned, and if it, can’t, then it just has to be tolerated as the cranky and unpleasant few of an unreconstructed minority. If someone isn’t overtly bigoted and expresses their views in polite tones rather than slurs, they might even get a public hearing. Attempts to draw attention to the insidious nature of their opinions might be castigated as not sufficiently tolerant of differing views. But antisemitism is just a racialized articulation of the same attack on liberal society. In the American context, this racialized attack on liberalism often portrays black civil servants, politicians, and members of the military as undeserving parasites taking the place of qualified Whites. The structure of its worldview is the same: there is a self-dealing cabal parasitically controlling society, and all of its invocations of universalism, etc. are lies, and manipulations for its own benefit. This is the famous “socialism of fools,” which reactionary capitalists, like Unz, can use to attack socialism and liberalism while leaving the accumulation of wealth in place. But it's not merely a lie, a tool self-consciously used for manipulation, although in some cases it can be: it is an ideological misrecognition and fetishization of the role of Jews or other racial groups in the creation and maintenance of capitalist society and its social conflicts and inequalities. It can be passionately believed in, not just used instrumentally, which makes it dangerous. The racism and antisemitism we are seeing are being generated structurally out of the political and social nature of these politics. It is not an accidental matter of personal antipathies. That’s why a Jewish person like Unz can adopt the ideology of antisemitism.
Speaking of the socialism of fools, Compact, one of the leading journals of ideological mystification, has a piece by Leighton Woodhouse on “DOGE as Class War.” Superficially, it seems similar to what I and others have been writing about the class war of Silicon Valley’s assault on the professional-managerial layer. It draws on a tradition of analysis that goes back to the ex-Trotskyist James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution: