Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,
The Trump administration, pushed by the Department of Government Efficiency and deployed by the Office of Personnel Management, has sent another email to all federal employees with a normal request to present five tasks accomplished in the last week.
It’s an easy task. It takes 5 minutes. In the service industry, this is entirely normal, even routine. Taking inventory of the workforce is standard for any new management in the private sector.
Oddly, absolute mania broke out among the pundit class. Government unions are preparing lawsuits. The panic and frenzy is palpable. As it turns out, no new president has ever done anything like this before, no Democrat who believes in good government and no Republican who supposedly distrusts bureaucracy.
Something dramatic has hit Washington. It’s about more than Trump.
The party now in control of the US executive branch is a third party built out of the corpses of two existing parties. It goes by the name Republican but this is nearly a historical accident. The GOP was a vessel that was least protected against invasion and occupation. It has now been nearly taken over by outsiders who had little or no influence within the party a decade ago.
Nearly all the top people now in power – including Trump of course but also Musk, Gabbard, Kennedy, Lutnick, and so many more, to say nothing of the voters themselves – are refugees from the Democratic Party. Coalitions have dramatically changed. Voting blocs have migrated. And policy debates and priorities are nothing like they have been in any period since the end of the Great War.
The occupiers left a Democratic Party that was and is busy consuming itself with Rousseauian frenzies on issues about which most people do not care or are otherwise completely opposed. The legacy establishment of the Republican Party, however, never welcomed them in. They were hated and resisted at every step.
The Kennedy Migration
To understand the remarkable speed and trajectory of this creation of a third party within the structure of two, consider that it was not even two years ago when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was first contemplating running for president as a Democrat.
The conditions were unique. He had gained an enormous following for his courage during Covid, standing up against the lockdowns, speaking out against the censorship and rights violations, and then decrying the imposition of shots that achieved nothing for public health.
In 2023, President Biden was unpopular and not even credible as the chief executive, much less as a candidate for a second term. The thinking in the Kennedy camp at the time was that a run by Kennedy for the Democratic nomination would force an open primary and he could lead the party back to its roots, away from woke totalitarianism toward the political values of his father and uncle.
In theory, all of this seemed plausible. His first rallies were crowded events, and the money poured in. Volunteers were signing up to work for the campaign. The first ads that appeared were nostalgic of a lost time, an America before the shattering of civic culture that came with the assassination of his uncle in 1963. The framing and even music of his campaign reflected such themes.
If anyone could fix the Democrats, it was surely Kennedy with a lifetime of activism and experience in litigation against corporate capture of agencies, plus a recent campaign for human rights and free speech. The presumption here was that the Democrats had some base of support that still supported such values. And maybe that was right but his intentions ran headlong into the machinery of party leadership.
His intention was to challenge Trump for the presidency, and the basis of the challenge was rather obvious. It was, after all, under Trump’s watch that the lockdowns began and the legal apparatus that led to the dangerous shots was deployed. It was Trump who kicked off the economic crisis with wave after wave of stimulus payments plus monetary expansion. As an empirical matter, he had presided over the worst invasion of rights of any president in history.
That’s where matters stood only two years ago. When it became obvious that there would be no open primary, Kennedy was tempted by the lure of an independent run. The most immediate problem of gaining ballot access hit hard. The system, after all, is set up for two parties only and they want no competition unless such an effort works as a spoiler. That was not obvious with Kennedy – he drew equally from both sides – so everyone with power wanted him excluded.
The other problem traces to the undeniable logic of winner-take-all elections. Under Duverger’s law, such contests tend to default to two choices only. This logic applies not just to politics but to all systems of voting. If you offer guests at a party the chance to vote on dinner, but the majority will prevail over the minority, everyone will immediately shift from voting for what they like toward voting against the food they hate the most.
For some reason, this pattern of strategic voting is hardly mentioned in polite company but it is a reality in US politics. Voters select against the candidate they fear the most and for the person they believe can win to forestall the worst possible outcome. In the Kennedy case, then, it meant that no matter how much people loved him, they would end up supporting either Biden or Trump regardless.
It so happened that over the summer, this logic was pressing itself heavily on the Kennedy campaign even as Trump faced astonishing levels of deep-state lawfare plus an assassination attempt, which conjured up deep family trauma in Kennedy. This provoked some discussions between the two that resulted in a historic realignment in politics.
During these discussions, Trump was frank about what happened during the Covid period. He had been lied to by his bureaucracy, the experts who had been assigned to him to say that this virus was a bioweapon with possible cure in the form of a new vaccine. With great reluctance and only for a limited time did he approve what everyone, including family members and conservative pundits, was telling him to do.
As for Warp Speed, Trump had always considered it to be an aggressive push for a solution. International and domestic sources named Hydroxychloroquine as a workable therapeutic, and so he ordered it for mass distribution.
It was essentially inconceivable in those days that the deeper bureaucracy would not only remove it and other repurposed drugs from distribution but even generate fake studies warning against them, all in an effort to push the new pharmaceutical product. Trump was surely astonished to see these events unfold in a manner that he could not control.
In that connection, both Trump and RFK, Jr. agreed on the dangers to American health from a variety of sources, including that emanating from the overuse of pharmaceuticals. Trump learned from Kennedy’s expertise on this matter, and they experienced a meeting of minds. And not only on this but on the evils of captured agencies, censorship, and deep state manipulation of public culture in general.
They would never agree on issues of oil and gas, of course, but on that topic too Kennedy had been moved by the Covid years to reconsider the supposed science behind climate change, especially that which recommended more human suffering as a means of solving a supposed existential threat.
We may never know the fullness of what took place over those two days but the discussions changed history, bringing together two mighty forces in American culture that had long been separated by party label and tribal identity: bourgeois nationalism vs. the haut bourgeois crunchy liberalism of the Whole Foods set. As it turned out, they had a common enemy.
Now Kennedy is the new head of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration, which is now undertaking the largest attempt at routing the DC establishment since Andrew Jackson. His goal is to turn around the whole ship of state, industry, and science, away from fakery and industrial corruption emanating from a single focus on infectious disease toward a new focus on chronic disease with science-based and natural solutions. That is a herculean task.
The Musk Migration
Elon Musk is the third force within this leadership triumvirate of the new party. Before 2020, he was a politically conventional investor and entrepreneur. Mostly he associated with the default party of the elites, the Democrats. Then lockdowns came. He was the only major corporate leader in the US and probably anywhere in the industrialized world who publicly stood up in protest. He said he would sooner sleep on the floor of his factory than close it. He refused vaccine mandates in all his companies. He pulled Tesla out of California and moved it to Texas. He moved all his corporate registrations out of Delaware.
By 2023, he was a changed man, newly aware of the threat of Leviathan, and did a deep dive into anti-statist literature. He faced his own family battles over woke ideology, and this made his intellectual transformation complete. He entered the political season with a new consciousness. Whereas he once regarded the bureaucracy as annoyingly necessary, he increasingly viewed it as the source of unchecked tyranny.
At one level, the meetup of Trump and Musk – like the meetup of Trump and Kennedy – was completely implausible. Musk regarded his greatest achievement as a businessman as having made the most mighty contribution to clean energy yet, having broken up the automotive monopoly and mass-produced the first commercially viable electric car. Trump, on the other hand, had sworn to smash electric car subsidies and called for deregulation of oil and gas. To link up with Trump meant having to put at risk even the tax break for consumers of EVs.
But he was ready for that simply because, like Kennedy, he became convinced that Western civilization itself was at risk from a woke Leviathan that had shown its teeth in the most brutal way during the Covid years. His reason for purchasing Twitter for $44 billion was to bust up the censorship cartel that was constructed to enforce lockdowns and promote the vaccine. Once having taken over, he discovered the extent of government control, uprooted it, and unleashed free speech on the US.
Here again, Musk shared this concern with Kennedy and Trump. All three linked up on the crucial issues: the desperate need to curb and crush the power and reach of the administrative state. This is an issue that crosses left and right, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, and all other traditional categories.
The Gabbard Migration
In this connection, there was also the national security angle in which decades of neoconservative “forever wars” had bred resentment and failure abroad, thus bringing over the articulate Tulsi Gabbard from the Democrats to Trump’s side, together with other influencers like Pete Hegseth who saw traditional military concerns having given way to woke ideology that Musk despised and Kennedy found to be deeply corrupting of traditional liberal concerns.
Their interests dovetailed with the revolt against globalism generally, which had taken the form of endless unwinnable wars, unchecked spigots of foreign aid, taxpayer pillaging in the form of subsidies to international syndicates of NGOs and agencies, plus the cruel deployment of immigration as a tool of electoral manipulation. It was the immigration point that triggered the populist push for the new nationalism that gathered in new refugees from the antiwar sectors of the left and right.
Donald Trump himself has undergone his own migration. An industrial mercantilist from his earliest public statements, he gradually absorbed a de facto anti-statism once his ill-fated first term was subverted from within and then he faced unprecedented lawfare and even assassination attempts to stop his second term. When he told the Libertarian Party that this lawfare made him a libertarian in spirit, he was being truthful. Once it became personal, the new head of state effectively turned against the state and all its works.
These are all circuitous paths but they reached the point of having huge influence over the public mind in the wake of the Covid years that discredited existing elites and prepared the way for a completely new way of going about government and public life. Given the meme culture of our time, this new party went by various names, first MAGA and then MAHA and then DOGE (in homage to the meme coin that started as a joke and then became real).
MAGA/MAHA/DOGE is not exactly the catchiest name for the new ruling party but it is far more accurate than Republican, much less Democrat. It is a new party formed out of the discredited shells of the two existing parties that lost public trust over decades of misrule culminating in an ill-fated attempt to master the exigencies of the microbial kingdom.
In a Kuhnian sense, the collapse of the orthodox paradigm (rule by administrative agencies informed by captured science) was complete by 2023, preparing the way for the pre-paradigmatic coalition of these fascinating characters, backed by popular movements that are mirrored in many lands, and generally sailing under the flag of populism. And here is the crucial fact: these leaders have their reach, influence, and power because the causes they represent have come of age with a population completely fed up with misrule by experts.
These are new and highly promising times, as the old undergoes a merciful dismantling and something entirely new takes its place. We find the roots of the ideology of the administrative state in the works of Woodrow Wilson, and it takes only a few minutes of reading his deluded fantasies of how science and compulsion would forge a better world to see that it was only a matter of time before the whole experiment was in tatters.
It took more than a century but that day is finally here. The paradigm has shifted. For all the messiness and frenzy – including the chaos, confusion, and betrayals – our times at least present opportunity to reassert a foundational principle of the Enlightenment; namely that the people themselves should have some fluid and influential role in shaping the workings of the regime under which they are forced to live.
