I’ve recently discovered that the DOGE-bags have a plan, and it’s not simply to move fast and break things.

It’s called the Dark Enlightenment, and “seeks to implement authoritarianism with a combination of elite technocrats (as in the IT type, not the older notion of “high subject matter skills”) and AI in charge.”

Singapore is their explicit model for America’s future. During his reign, [Lee Kuan Yew, aka LKY, Singapore’s former leader] successfully fused pro-corporate economics and state socialism, creating a distinctly Libertarian ideals of social and political control. This is LKY’s model: economic development above all else—even human rights. A “soft” authoritarianism, as Fareed Zakaria has called it. “The exuberance of democracy,” LKY explained, “leads to indiscipline and disorderly conduct, which are inimical to development.”

While the idea of a US of Singapore sounds creepily dystopian, I’m pretty sure the DOGE-bags lack the competence to pull that off. Instead, it’s good bet that they end up turning the US into Russia of the 90’s, ruled by Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs. Rather than a clean, orderly business environment, the DOGE-bags are more likely to recreate a looted countryside and plummeting life expectancy. A hellish dystopia, with armed guards, private militias, and gated enclaves coupled with vast slums.

At this point it’s probably a good time to talk about the elephant-in-the-room. Why the hell does some quasi-official organization have the power to wield a chainsaw to government agencies and personal? It’s hard to follow their trail of destruction, but DOGE appears to be the plaything of Elon Musk. The fact that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not because of his acumen of political or economic theory. He’s able to do it because the fuck-turd has several hundred billion dollars.

Because he has several hundred billion dollars Musk’s mad vision is our brave new reality. But Musk didn’t come out of central casting as an evil villain. The inequality, the decades of policy and regulatory failures that led up to Elon Musk’s net worth, were the precondition for all of the insanity that is now playing out. Rich people hated the New Deal with it’s leveling of the playing field between capital and labor and set about to dismantle it.

And here we are.

Decades of regressive wealth redistribution not only worsened the poverty experienced at the bottom of the class system but, at the top, produced a coterie of billionaires whose wealth allowed them to dominate our political systems, ensuring that they could only fail upward, sanguine that any act of excessive risk taking would be bailed out by the neoliberal state.

The billionaires have won the class war and that’s why Musk/DOGE is running amuck.

Unfortunately, bad shit happens when you loose oligarchs on the world,