By Matthew N. Lyons
I anticipated a drive toward dictatorship, but I didn’t anticipate DOGE.
When Donald Trump was reelected president, I (like many other people) knew he would make a grab for power beyond anything in his first term. I’ve traced Trump’s increasingly intimate relationship with far right politics, from his mutually beneficial arrangement with the alt-right in 2016 to his efforts in 2024 to remake the Republican Party itself as his personal vehicle. Like many other critics, I noted that the erosion of structural checks on presidential power, coupled with supporters’ years of planning on how to seize control of the federal bureaucracy, would make the second Trump term a lot more authoritarian than the first.
What I didn’t expect was that Trump would subcontract the dynamic core of this authoritarian power drive to another narcissistic billionaire. That he would not only use Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” to attack the civil service but give its team of outside operatives carte blanche to seize semi-autonomous (and potentially lucrative) control over government agencies, databases, and payment systems. That just a few weeks after the inauguration, we’d be talking not just about a coup, but a Trump-Musk coup.
“When Donald Trump was reelected president, I knew he would make a grab for power beyond anything in his first term.… What I didn’t expect was that Trump would subcontract the dynamic core of this authoritarian power drive to another narcissistic billionaire.”
I don’t know why Trump chose to do this, whether it was admiration for what Musk did to Twitter, Inc. or simple laziness. Or why so far he’s been okay with having a deputy who continually threatens to upstage him, whether Musk is using bribery or blackmail or is just really good at stroking Trump’s fragile, fragile ego. I don’t know whether this alliance will last months or years or fall apart next week, and what will happen when it ends.
But setting personalities aside, from a political standpoint DOGE’s role in the new regime’s power grab points to two interrelated changes in the Trump project that deserve close attention:
- First, while MAGA movement ideology centers on right-wing populism, in that it combines supremacist attacks on various oppressed groups with distorted anti-elitism, DOGE is guided by self-described neoreactionaries, whose ideology glorifies elites and rejects populist appeals in principle.
- Second, while the first Trump administration was backed by an unstable coalition of competing capitalist interests, at this point high technology capitalists closely aligned with neoreactionary politics appear to be at the head of the pro-Trump business bloc.
These changes have helped make the second Trump presidency more dangerous than the first, but they also point to potential divisions and conflicts within the Trump coalition—vulnerabilities that might help us develop better and more effective resistance strategies.
Liberals and Democratic Party leaders are framing this resistance as a struggle to defend democracy. But the U.S. government has always been an oligarchy (to borrow a term from Joe Biden’s farewell address), in which a tiny capitalist elite holds most political power and has coopted mass support and wielded systemic violence to serve its own ends—from genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America to genocide against Palestinians. At the same time, generations of social movements in the U.S. have fought and won real political space and social reforms that have mitigated some of the system’s worst effects. The Trump regime’s dictatorial power grab threatens these gains. If left unchecked it will have massive human costs, disproportionately hurt oppressed communities, and sharply constrict the space for political activity, especially radical organizing.
Neoreaction’s RAGEful vision
Neoreaction (not to be confused with neoconservatism) has been around for almost two decades, but for most of that time it seemed an unlikely candidate to come anywhere near to reshaping the federal government apparatus. Here’s some of what I wrote about the movement in “Ctrl-Alt-Delete,” my 2017 report about the alt-right:
“Neoreaction is another dissident right-wing current with a vision of small-scale authoritarianism that has emerged online in the past decade, which overlaps with and has influenced the Alternative Right. Like the Alt Right and much of the manosphere, neoreaction (often abbreviated as NRx, and also known as Dark Enlightenment) is a loosely unified school of thought that rejects egalitarianism in principle, argues that differences in human intelligence and ability are mainly genetic, and believes that cultural and political elites wrongfully limit the range of acceptable discourse. Blogger Curtis Yarvin (writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug) first articulated neoreactionary ideology in 2007, but many other writers have contributed to it. Neoreaction emphasizes order and restoring the social stability that supposedly prevailed before the French Revolution, along with technocratic and futurist concerns such as transhumanism, a movement that hopes to radically ‘improve’ human beings through technology….
“Neoreactionaries, who are known for their arcane, verbose theoretical monologues, appear to be mostly young, computer-oriented men, and their ideas have spread partly through the tech startup scene. PayPal co-founder and Trump supporter Peter Thiel has voiced some neoreactionary-sounding ideas….
“[Unlike many alt-rightists,] neoreactionaries all regard regular people as utterly unsuited to hold political power—’a howling irrational mob’ as NRx theorist Nick Land has put it. Some NRxers advocate monarchy; others want to turn the state into a corporation with members of an intellectual elite as shareholders.”
In the same report, I noted that neoreactionaries were less likely than alt-rightists to support Donald Trump and might or might not share most alt-rightists’ commitment to white nationalism and antisemitism, but also that many alt-rightists regarded neoreaction as “a related movement that offers many positive contributions.” Alt-rightist Gregory Hood (Kevin DeAnna) described neoreaction, perhaps presciently, as “absolutely core to understanding…how power functions.” I however concluded that neoreaction seemed “too esoteric to have much of a political impact” on its own. My mistake.
In the interval, the alt-right as a significant force has collapsed, yet neoreactionary ideology and Curtis Yarvin’s ideas specifically have continued to percolate and spread within the tech world and beyond, such that James Pogue in a 2022 Vanity Fair article described them as “foundational to a whole political and cultural scene.” Peter Thiel and other venture capitalists such as David Sacks and Marc Andreessen have boosted NRx’s rise. Vice President JD Vance, a former Thiel employee whose 2022 U.S. Senate run was heavily funded by Thiel, has cited Yarvin as a political influence, and the two are or have been friends.
Many of Yarvin’s pronouncements over the years closely foreshadow what the Trump regime, and DOGE specifically, have been doing. From that 2022 James Pogue article:
“[T]he way conservatives can actually win in America, [Yarvin] has argued, is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up. As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American ‘regime.’ What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a ‘national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.’”
As journalist Gil Duran notes, “Elon Musk’s DOGE is just a rebranded version of RAGE. He demands mass resignations, locks career employees out of their offices, threatens to delete entire departments, and seizes total control of sensitive government systems and programs.”
“JD Vance, tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 all proposed a systematic purge and dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. Yet the specific similarities between [Curtis] Yarvin’s proposal and DOGE’s role within the Trump regime are too striking to ignore.”
Duran goes on to quote a 2022 Yarvin essay that envisioned a “butterfly revolution” under a second Trump administration: “We’ve got to risk…a full reboot of the USG [U.S. government]. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945.” As Duran notes, “The World War II metaphor casts the federal government as a conquered enemy now controlled by an outside force.”
In this “revolution,” Yarvin proposed,
“Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.
“…The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO’s performance, again on TV, and can fire him if need be.”
Duran notes that JD Vance, tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 all also proposed a systematic purge and dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. Yet the specific similarities between Yarvin’s proposal and DOGE’s role within the Trump regime are too striking to ignore. While I’m not aware of any direct links between Musk and Yarvin, several of the young men staffing DOGE have either worked for Thiel or expressed neoreactionary views.
But despite its impact on the current Trump regime, neoreactionary politics is not MAGA politics, as the tagline to James Pogue’s 2022 Vanity Fair article noted. The key reason is that neoreaction is not populist. The movement to Make America Great Again, Trump’s political base, is a classic example of right-wing populism, i.e., a movement that combines calls to intensify oppression with twisted forms of anti-elitism. MAGA politics is about defending privilege and attacking those who are seen as threatening it from below, but it also feeds on people’s sense of disempowerment, of being beaten down by a few people on top, a belief that those in power have betrayed “we the people” and must be stripped of their positions.
Neoreactionaries, by contrast, believe firmly that elites should rule and “the people” (Nick Land’s “howling irrational mob”) should not. Since Trump first entered the 2016 presidential race, MAGA aimed to mobilize a mass movement to overturn the political establishment, liberal and conservative alike. This initiative included not just electoral campaigns but also broad-based organizing and physical protests that culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol in hopes of overturning the 2020 election results by force. But neoreactionaries dismiss the whole idea of a popular uprising. As Yarvin wrote in June 2024, “Charlottesville [the 2017 Unite the Right rally] and January 6 were the last lame breaths of what John Adams called ‘mobocracy’ in America.” What Yarvin envisioned wasn’t a popular uprising, but rather to “hack” the system in order to break it.
Tech capitalists turn toward Trump
The neoreactionary movement is rooted in the computer technology sector, and its growing influence has been closely tied with tech capitalists’ shift toward the political right. These developments have altered the Trump administration’s relationship with the business community.
As I have discussed before, in 2016 “Trump’s support within the big business community was—for any president and especially a Republican one—unusually limited, fragmented, and unstable.” As one team of analysts argued, his capitalist supporters drew from “several layers of investor blocs with little in common other than their intense dislike of existing forms of American government.” Partly for this reason, Trump’s administration pushed policies that appealed to both supporters and opponents of neoliberalism, rolling back environmental regulations and taxes for corporations and the wealthy on one hand, but restricting immigration and trade on the other. Trump’s weak and disunified capitalist support also contributed to his administration’s oscillation between interventionist and anti-interventionist approaches to foreign and military policy.
This situation changed in 2024, as former Democrat Elon Musk donated almost $200 million toward Trump’s reelection and became one of his closest advisors, while high technology business leaders as a bloc swung behind Trump. Tech CEOs Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google and its parent company Alphabet), and Musk held seats of honor at Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, symbolizing their sector’s new role at the center of the pro-Trump business faction. Also in 2024, billionaire investors in cryptocurrency and in the TikTok social media platform became supporters of Trump’s reelection campaign, leading Trump to switch from opposition to support on both of these issues.
Lots of people have offered explanations for these tech sector shifts toward Trump. Here’s a helpful summary from Aaron Bartley on Facebook:
“1. The techno-feudalists have billions invested in crypto and without a big push from the government and the removal of all regulations, their money will be lost. Crypto has not mainstreamed in the way they expected, both because of Biden-era regulations on speculative investments and because the public just isn’t into it. They need the state to manage the transition to crypto.
“2. Similarly, they’re gravely concerned about the trillions they’ve invested in AI [artificial intelligence]. Any amount of regulation or constraints by the state is seen as a death-knell. They know that AI has prompted a speculative bubble and they need the state to manage the bubble through subsidies and contracts. They also need the state to aggressively shield the US from Chinese AI technology.
“3. Both crypto and AI are burning up the earth. The electricity demands of both AI and crypto are enormous. They need a completely deregulated energy industry and rapid shift away from any climate policy. Even the mention of climate change is a threat to their fortunes.
“4. China has caught up faster than they expected in all realms of tech. They need an ultra-protectionist/nationalist regime to keep Chinese technology at bay.”
Another factor is that newish tech firms such as Anduril Industries and Palantir Technologies (both bankrolled by Peter Thiel) as well as Musk’s SpaceX are increasingly challenging traditional military manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics for Pentagon and Homeland Security contracts. Longtime military policy analyst Michael Klare argues that “a new MIC [military-industrial complex] is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one.” Klare sees a growing divide “between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment,” with political consequences for the Trump coalition: “Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction.”
Points of weakness
Musk’s DOGE is at the cutting edge of Trump’s drive to expand presidential authority and shred the principle of checks and balances that has been a cornerstone of the U.S. government since its founding. The initiative aims to both drastically shrink the administrative state and remake it as the president’s political tool, but it also places extensive core state functions under the control of an essentially private body with the capacity to engage in outright plunder and virtually no accountability to anyone except—at most—Trump himself. The regime’s authoritarian power drive has already begun to have devastating effects on people’s livelihoods, health care, social services, and beyond. Whether the courts capitulate to this assault or try to block it, with uncertain outcome, some portion of its impact on the state is likely to be irreversible.
“DOGE’s operations help us identify several potential points of weakness within the Trump regime. Trump and Musk may have their falling out. DOGE may overreach through recklessness, incompetence, and hubris. Tech capitalists’ new status as Trump favorites may alienate other powerful sections of the business community. Neoreactionary elitism may also collide with MAGA populism, especially as the real world impact of dismantling federal agencies and withholding funding is increasingly felt.”
At the same time, DOGE’s operations help us identify several potential points of weakness within the Trump regime. Trump and Musk may have their falling out, with the result either that Musk gets fired or there’s a very messy struggle for power. DOGE may overreach through recklessness, incompetence, and hubris, alienating supporters and provoking stronger push-back from the courts, Democrats, Republicans, or other sections of the regime itself. Thus recently we’ve seen Republican congressmembers criticizing DOGE and Trump-appointed heads of key agencies countermanding instructions from the DOGE-controlled Office of Personnel Management. Tech capitalists’ new status as Trump favorites may foster greater cohesiveness within the regime on economic policy and geostrategy, but it could also alienate other powerful sections of the business community, whether around competition for contracts as Michael Klare outlined or around other issues.
Neoreactionary elitism may also collide with MAGA populism, especially as the real world impact of dismantling federal agencies and withholding funding is increasingly felt. Even before the inauguration, Musk clashed publicly with MAGA stalwarts Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer over the H-1B visa program. And while some antifascists assume that tech capitalists will win any such fight, I’m not so sure. There are sections of the MAGA movement, first and foremost the vast New Apostolic Reformation network, whose ideological commitment runs deeper than loyalty to Trump, and who have extensive financial and media resources wholly independent of Silicon Valley.
I don’t have specific strategic conclusions to draw from all this yet, but any fault lines within the Trump coalition deserve close attention. They bely the image of unity and omnipotence that the regime wants to project, and they may create opportunities we can exploit.
Yet in looking at ways to combat the Trump regime, rallying to the Democratic Party would be a serious mistake. As I wrote recently,
“Since the late 1970s, Democrats have been complicit with Republicans in making neoliberalism the dominant form of capitalist rule, expanding the repressive state apparatus, and strengthening military interventionism—policies that in some ways laid the groundwork for Trumpism and in others fueled a right-wing populist backlash from which Trump has benefited.”
“While the Republican Party’s leadership in expanding state repression has received more attention, the Democrats, too, have played an active role… Barack Obama oversaw the $100 billion construction of ‘the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen.’”
While the Republican Party’s leadership in expanding state repression (such as passing the Patriot Act and authorizing the use of torture) has received more attention, the Democrats, too, have played an active role—from Bill Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (which weakened defendants’ rights and restrictions on wiretapping) to the Biden administration’s dangerous use of “seditious conspiracy” charges against far rightists (a tactic that inevitably fuels repression against the left). In between, Barack Obama oversaw the $100 billion construction of “the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen,” and, as a gift to President-elect Donald Trump just days before leaving office, Obama signed an executive order making it “easier for the nation’s intelligence agencies to share unfiltered [surveillance] information about innocent people.” On a state and local level, Democrats have actively promoted measures to suppress Palestine solidarity protests against the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. Unlike the Trump administration and DOGE, none of these initiatives represented a systemic shift or targeted the administrative state—they mostly targeted radicals, foreigners, poor people, and other subversives.
Similarly, while tech capitalists’ collective embrace of Trump is a new and dangerous development, Democrats helped build their influence in Washington. The shift to unmanned weapons systems (which has helped tech companies win more military contracts) has its roots in the Obama administration, which vastly expanded the use of drones to carry out assassinations, at a cost of hundreds of civilian lives. And given the Obama administration’s massive construction of surveillance infrastructure (including spy satellites, supercomputers, listening posts, fiber-optic cables, etc.), it’s no surprise that web, telecommunications, software, and other computer-related companies favored Obama over Republicans. This finding comes from a study of business contributions in the 2012 presidential race, which concluded that “national Democratic leaders are politically allied with many of the industries closely linked with the new National Surveillance State.”
All this doesn’t mean we should treat all examples of capitalist political influence as the same, or ignore the immediate, overriding threat the Trump administration presents to all of us. Rather, it underscores the pressing need to build a broad-based resistance movement independent of the Democratic Party, where radical and anticapitalist voices are not silenced.
Thanks to Gerry O’Sullivan for directing my attention back to the neoreactionaries, and to Clare Bayard and Xtn Alexander for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Image credits
1. Photo by David Merfield, portrait of Curtis Yarvin taken in the garden of St Paul’s Cathedral, 11 July 2023, CC0 1.0 Universal, via Wikimedia Commons.
2. AI-generated image posted by Elon Musk, 12 November 2024, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.