What’s happening to federal workers in DC and across the country feels unprecedented and terrible. But it’s also painfully familiar, like a show that’s been rerun too often. It echoes like a dire voiceover:
Return to the office! There is no office to return to. Resign before you're fired! You can't resign, you're fired. Take this paltry sum, which we may not give you! Stay and do the jobs of the others we fired.
Sucking up to the bosses could save you! Yes, there are many bosses. Here are new ones—if you like them, they won't be here long. You've got decades of experience, you say? And a job with meaning, one that helps people? We don’t need that anymore.
Cry more! Stop crying. We told you to learn coding! We can replace the lot of you with a few bootlickers who know how to code. Here they are now, spinning in your chairs like children…
We didn’t choose the show, yet we are forced to watch—a grand performance of late capitalist brutality on federal workers. It is the same brutality that Oliver Stone’s corporate raider Gordon Gekko argued for, with vicious vigor, in the 80s.
A coup can be performed in many ways. Musk & Co. has chosen this one, the one he and his fellows have yearned for and know best. Run government like a business. Strip it for parts. Suck the value out of it. If there’s a husk to leave, leave it.
They have chosen to make their hostile takeover a spectacle, to make us watch—because, of course, this is what Musk and his vehicle Trump do: treat business and politics as entertainment, and now it’s governing’s turn. Musk’s career, like Trump’s, has depended on the showmanship of a carnival barker.
Coups require a lack of transparency, but they also depend on a dramatic display of power. Musk & Co. has chosen to publicize its invasion of government work spaces, shuttering of departments, freezing of funds—and abuse of employees. Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times shared some of the stories of people abruptly furloughed without pay via email, cut off from health insurance, escorted by security from their offices.
This part of the spectacle is schadenfreude for the MAGA faithful who've been taught for up to half a century to hate unions and public sector workers for their benefits and protections instead of hating the owners and investors who stripped them of theirs. This part of the audience can watch with glee as payment for their political support. Of course, they may not get much more.
And the rest of us? For a hot minute some were demanding equal opportunity and wanting raises and quiet-quitting and all that. Time we were made to remember who’s boss with a spectacle meant to traumatize and re-traumatize by reminding us of our financial and social precarity.
More than 82,000 Americans lost jobs in January, one of the worst months in a decade and a half, though we had only sort of recovered from the pandemic, when essential workers had to risk their lives for their jobs and millions were laid off. The Great Recession, in which 30 million lost work and household net worth cratered, is not some distant memory; it continues to shape financial situations and psyches. Many live the irony of “the right to work.” Tech has dehumanized jobs, ended careers, and obliterated (excuse me, disrupted) industries; now, AI looms, threatening to wipe out countless more positions.
It’s no coincidence that a tech oligarch is leading the coup. In a column this week, Julia Angwin explains why they have aligned with Trump, quoting Steve Bannon, who has claimed:
the Silicon Valley “broligarchs” are cozying up to the newly elected president because they “want essentially a bailout.”
Of course, Mr. Bannon has his own agenda, as he is battling the tech bros for President Trump’s attention and favor. But Mr. Bannon has also spotted something real. Stuck between the soaring costs of complying with global regulations and the astronomical costs of the race for artificial intelligence dominance, our largest tech companies are likely turning to the Trump administration to try to lock in their advantages.
The tech oligarchs need access to avoid regulation and garner subsidies and contracts, but they have other reasons to need more than access to the federal government—to participate in a coup. In the future they have bet heavily on—one in which AI replaces a great swath of human labor and wreaks further havoc on the climate—the people may get a touch itchy. Musk & Co. need control. They need their tentacles inside the government.
Musk & Co. wants an America in which the public is not composed of empowered citizens and careful voters but of cowed employees and consumers without choices. As they make a display of terrorizing federal workers, they want us to clap or quake. It is lack of solidarity that has brought us to this place. Let’s stand and speak out on behalf of federal workers. They are us.