Delusions

“It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.” P. J. O’Rourke

Decades before Americans heard about DOGE, P. J. O’Rourke’s NY Times bestseller, “Parliament of Whores”, hilariously and irreverently described how the US Government functioned in its waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer’s money; this is even more true today than it was back in 1991. The last time anything like DOGE was attempted was under the Clinton administration, to some extent successfully, producing a balanced budget and even a surplus. If DOGE does anything comparable it will be sorely needed, but even should that happen, it may be too little too late. While we should have no delusions about the extent of corruption DOGE has found so far, neither should we have any regarding the dire situation created by the resulting debt.

O’Rourke will not be around to see if DOGE will deliver what has been promised as he died in 2022, but we can hope that it will provide something of lasting value as it pursues its mandate. Hope as they say is not a plan, and campaign promises seldom become action; I was not hopeful that Trump’s would be any different. However, based on what has been found so far, we have both dismay as to the extent of the waste, fraud and abuse Doge has found, and encouragement that things are being done about it. The curious negative reactions about DOGE sent me running to O’Rourke’s book to find just this very quote, because the second sentence of it is the most important – we should not be fooled that such reactions aren’t a fear of exposure more than a concern for the corruption involved.

This corruption has as its motivation power, and as its justification moral leadership; the American people have been asked by many administrations to have faith in this virtuous concept called democracy, a delusion to disguise a vast insatiable bureaucracy making the people dependent on benefits created by the wealth it takes from them. Delusion leads to confusion, which inevitably leads to desperation; when an electorate reaches that point, it is forced to reconsider the premise of the delusion, and that is a tipping point that leads to polarized partisanism. In this last election that became a choice between two movements, Progressivism and MAGA; the former represented socialism disguised as some new form of democracy, the latter a populism of overt patriotism.

As a libertarian I can never support socialism, but I am aware that patriotism can be manipulated to support policies conducive to socialism. According to the most recent polls, many from organizations not exactly friendly to Trump, his administration enjoys high approval ratings, while the Democratic Party is adrift, wallowing in hysterical denunciations of just about everything. There are examples of things that Trump has said that are patently outrageous regarding the Associated Press, tariffs, Canada, Ukraine, Greenland…and it’s a safe bet there will be plenty more; this is Trump, a narcissistic grifter given to self-adulation and unrelenting deprecation of all who criticize him, but that’s who he’s always been. What’s more important than the personality of a president is his policies, and so far he has delivered on his campaign promises, something I didn’t expect he was capable of.

H. L. Mencken once observed that “Politics, as hopeful men practice it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.” It’s only been a month since Trump’s inauguration, so there’s four years to go before any intelligent and objective assessment of his second term can be made; will it be merely a change in form, or something of substance? True patriots will ignore the rhetoric of political pundits and parties, and ask the same question four years from now that Trump did during his campaign– are we better off than we were four years ago?