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Exactly how does Elon Musk know what “the people” want?
During his appearance in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Musk presented public opinion as the standard against which his team’s Trump-approved evisceration of government programs was being measured. He insisted that there existed an “unelected, fourth, unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy” and described why he felt that it needed to be brought to heel.

“If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Musk told reporters. “If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.”

This is a very “Elon Musk” thing to say. It sounds clever, in the manner of a college-debate-club participant: bureaucracy and democracy end in the same suffix! But it’s just sophistry. Musk is implying that bureaucracy — the administration of a democratic government serving 330 million people — has replaced democracy not because it has but because he is trying to advocate for gutting huge portions of that administrative effort.

He seeks to gut the government, mind you, through unilateral executive authority masquerading as popular democracy — better known as Trumpism. Musk’s claim that the bureaucracy somehow sprang into being outside public will ignores that it is the slowly accrued product of agreement between the elected representatives he disparages. It’s imperfect, but it’s hardly less democratic than Musk’s standard, which is “what Musk (and perhaps Trump) thinks people want.”

The flip side of those numbers, of course, is that nearly everyone else thinks either that the focus has been appropriate or even too modest. At this point we note that polls are necessarily imprecise. This one asked about “cutting government spending” instead of, say, “denying an elderly woman access to oxygen” or “letting half a billion dollars in food aid spoil” or “eviscerating spending that aids cancer research.”

That’s the most important caveat here: Most of what Musk and his team have done to date has been abstract to most Americans. But there’s a reason the bureaucracy exists at the scale it does, which is that constituencies and advocates have convinced representatives that those programs are worth funding. As Musk himself pointed out, when funding stops, complaints start. We can anticipate a staggering number of complaints over the coming months.

Remember, too, that many Americans think the government should do more than it already does. In Gallup polling released shortly after the election, 4 in 10 respondents said that they thought the government should be more active in solving the country’s problems, in line with historic patterns.

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Red said:

Exactly how does Elon Musk know what “the people” want?
During his appearance in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Musk presented public opinion as the standard against which his team’s Trump-approved evisceration of government programs was being measured. He insisted that there existed an “unelected, fourth, unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy” and described why he felt that it needed to be brought to heel.

“If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Musk told reporters. “If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.”

This is a very “Elon Musk” thing to say. It sounds clever, in the manner of a college-debate-club participant: bureaucracy and democracy end in the same suffix! But it’s just sophistry. Musk is implying that bureaucracy — the administration of a democratic government serving 330 million people — has replaced democracy not because it has but because he is trying to advocate for gutting huge portions of that administrative effort.

He seeks to gut the government, mind you, through unilateral executive authority masquerading as popular democracy — better known as Trumpism. Musk’s claim that the bureaucracy somehow sprang into being outside public will ignores that it is the slowly accrued product of agreement between the elected representatives he disparages. It’s imperfect, but it’s hardly less democratic than Musk’s standard, which is “what Musk (and perhaps Trump) thinks people want.”

The flip side of those numbers, of course, is that nearly everyone else thinks either that the focus has been appropriate or even too modest. At this point we note that polls are necessarily imprecise. This one asked about “cutting government spending” instead of, say, “denying an elderly woman access to oxygen” or “letting half a billion dollars in food aid spoil” or “eviscerating spending that aids cancer research.”

That’s the most important caveat here: Most of what Musk and his team have done to date has been abstract to most Americans. But there’s a reason the bureaucracy exists at the scale it does, which is that constituencies and advocates have convinced representatives that those programs are worth funding. As Musk himself pointed out, when funding stops, complaints start. We can anticipate a staggering number of complaints over the coming months.

Remember, too, that many Americans think the government should do more than it already does. In Gallup polling released shortly after the election, 4 in 10 respondents said that they thought the government should be more active in solving the country’s problems, in line with historic patterns.

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Cry more.
 
Since I don't have a twitter account I never get to see all the brilliant things PJF posts. Or should I say I can't really see anything PJF posts because it is always only brain rot twitter trash.
 
Sardines said:
Since I don't have a twitter account I never get to see all the brilliant things PJF posts. Or should I say I can't really see anything PJF posts because it is always only brain rot twitter trash.
Click to expand...
Other than a few funny posts, EVERYTHING I post is substantial news. Get an X account and read the news right from the news makers, not the filtered garbage most of you consume.
 
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