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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   1776 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Some thoughts on the infamous OPM e-mail:

Whether the OPM e-mail asking federal employees to send a five bullet point list of what they achieved in the last week to a OPM e-mail address apparently controlled by Musk and/or @DOGE has turned into an even bigger scissor statement that is usual for US partisan politics. What is going on? (Well, it seems like it was an unconventional proof-of-liveness check on the federal employee base with no plan to read the responses, but I am more interested in the response)

First point - if this came from management, it would be a completely reasonable request. It would be odd if it came from senior management rather than your direct line manager (does a top executive have time to read all those replies?) but not necessarily irregular. It is the kind of thing I can absolutely imagine the CEO doing at a founder-mode startup with a few thousand employees. But it didn't come from management. It came from HR (literally, in the sense that the sender shows up as "HR" in Outlook, and in practice in that it came from OPM, which is effectively HR for the civilian federal government). Indeed, it came from an anonymous role account in HR. (Musk tweeted that the e-mails originated with him, but two courts have ruled, at Musk's request, that Musk is a notorious shitposter and it is legally unreasonable to take a Musk tweet seriously, so they are still legally anonymous)

If I received such an e-mail from HR in my day job at a bank (and I don't think any other large manager-mode organisation would be different), it would be unprofessional to do what the e-mail says and send a quick response cc my direct line manager. In a normal corporate (or, I assume, public sector) environment, you take at least some steps to make sure you don't accidentally become a patsy in someone else's political maneuver against your boss or department. So if I got such an e-mail, my immediate response would be to forward to my line manager* with a note saying something like "Not sure what is going on here - will hold off on replying until you are able to investigate" - and if I did eventually reply, I would agree the reponse with my manager. But the more likely outcome (unless senior management had been warned about the exercise beforehand) would be that the rapid large-scale escalation would lead to the head of the department sending an all-staff e-mail saying "Please don't respond until we have investigated what is going on here" and trying to get hold of someone in the CEO's office urgently. (And struggling to do so, because every senior manager in the organisation would be doing the same thing).

And this is just looking at the office politics perspective, From the infosec angle, this is worse. The e-mail said "don't send classified information", but if you work in a job where you are actually trying to keep secrets, there isn't a short, safe unclassified summary of what you did last week. I am not an expert on the US classification system, but I do know that producing an unclassified summary of classified information (including, for example, the classified information you worked on in the last week) is difficult work that only a few people in each department are qualified to do. The rule in corporate finance departments at banks (where almost all staff have access to market-moving non-public information such as upcoming mergers) and it is "Do not discuss live deals with anyone outside the department, even in general terms." For a corporate financier, sending a meaningful response to that e-mail would be a firing offence. The various department heads (including Trump's own political appointments like Kash Patel) in national security related departments who told their staff not to respond are doing the obviously correct thing.

tl;dr - the freakers-out are right - sending out an all-staff e-mail of this type from HR was irregular, and would have been massively disruptive to any large organisation other than a startup used to working around a hyperactive micromanaging founder-CEO.

* If the rumours are true that Musk is sending these e-mails from a jury-rigged server rather than an official secure US government system, then the e-mail would show up as external in Outlook, and my actual immediate response would be to report it to IT security as a possible phishing attack.

Public servants have the pleasure of serving outside of the strictures of capitalism. The park service guy whose job it is to tell tourists about the flowers every day has an absurd privilege that this is what his job gets to be.

The idea that these people are seething THIS much about simply being asked what they do is infuriating to me. The American taxpayers work as de facto indentured servants for almost a third of their working lives to pay the salaries of these people. The balls for them to freak out and do these petty protests (hang a flag from the top of El Capitan) is ridiculous and embarrassing.

You’re a public servant. If you don’t want to be accountable to the actual president of the United States, then go try your luck getting a job telling people about the flowers in the private sector. You might be surprised at how many jobs there are for that with a typical HR structure (my guess is: 0. The closest would be working as a grounds keeper for some oligarchs garden, maybe?)

absurd privilege that this is what his job gets to be.

You're welcome to apply if it's such a good deal. Well, you aren't, because land management is in a hiring freeze, but you would have been before Jan 20.

If I received such an e-mail from HR in my day job at a bank (and I don't think any other large manager-mode organisation would be different), it would be unprofessional to do what the e-mail says and send a quick response cc my direct line manager.

I work in a giant corporation. If HR tried to send this email, my senior management would (politely) blow a hole in them so large, the crater would be visible from space.

Kash and Gabbard had it right: "thanks OPM, we will manage our own".

And this is just looking at the office politics perspective, From the infosec angle, this is worse. The e-mail said "don't send classified information", but if you work in a job where you are actually trying to keep secrets, there isn't a short, safe unclassified summary of what you did last week.

Obviously the answer is send a troll email

  • [REDACTED]
  • [REDACTED]
  • [REDACTED]
  • [REDACTED]
  • [REDACTED]

I work in a giant corporation. If HR tried to send this email, my senior management would (politely) blow a hole in them so large, the crater would be visible from space.

Kash and Gabbard had it right: "thanks OPM, we will manage our own".

And honestly the only response anyone thinking through should have expected. Institutional power is legal authority + budget + manpower. An institution like OPM is only one of those.

Obviously the answer is send a troll email

[REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED]

One better-

Do, that, but-

Reply All

In an email with a header that starts "DO NOT REPLY ALL"

To the entire government.

(Yes, I know that's not technically possible... but.)

This is a bad analogy. This email is not HR department going rogue; it’s HR department executing a project that was mandated by CEO, and under a clear and explicit coordination with said CEO. Your senior management would not resist the HR in these circumstances.

Also, only a small fraction of government employees have security clearance, and if you lie to your employer about your work being classified when it’s not to obstruct them, it is grounds for disciplinary proceedings.

This makes me wonder about a tangential question: what fraction of federal workers use their email on a daily basis? It seems a very desk-jockey centric view to send out a bulk email and expect all employees to respond in days.

What about the park rangers in remote places: I've been to National Park offices that didn't take credit cards because they were mostly off-grid within the last couple years. Wildland firefighters? Do USPS mail carriers have work email? TSA agents? Or anyone taking a whole week of vacation? There are whole classes of useful (well, we can debate the TSA separately) jobs that involve showing up, doing the work, and calling it a day without ever sitting at a desk deliberately taking time to answer emails on a daily basis, and government-wide emails seem unlikely to be a good medium to reach everyone on their levels.

At big institutions even the janitor has a work email and checks it regularly.

  • If the rumours are true that Musk is sending these e-mails from a jury-rigged server rather than an official secure US government system, then the e-mail would show up as external in Outlook, and my actual immediate response would be to report it to IT security as a possible phishing attack.

This is such a non-issue in my opinion. The correct analogy would be that you receive a phone call directly from the CEO's deputy, where he verifies his identity, and tells you "you're about to receive an email saying...". In such a situation, I imagine the calculus would be different. Reporting it as a phishing attack would be malicious compliance or outright disruptive and you should expect to be on the CEO/deputy's shit list.

I'm sure there are a lots of things DOGE intends to do with this special project. Identifying the most disruptive federal employees is hopefully at the top of this list. The best strategy for any fed employee is to keep their head down and get lost in the hundreds of thousands of other low level fed workers. The email is brilliant because this stuff is like catnip to the most ideological of trump's enemies. They literally cant resist fighting back and "Resisting". It's truly a brilliant move.

The correct analogy would be that you receive a phone call directly from the CEO's deputy, where he verifies his identity, and tells you "you're about to receive an email saying...". In such a situation, I imagine the calculus would be different

If that email didn't copy at least 1 person direct management chain, it would be extremely irregular.

The main reason, of course, is that if the CEO or his deputy wanted me to do something, he would want to direct my management chain to make that happen and to supervise it and to remove any roadblocks.

My guess is that part of the idea is to route around management. Presumably do-nothing employees are already known to their managers, but have been receiving some sort of protection for years.

This is such a non-issue in my opinion. The correct analogy would be that you receive a phone call directly from the CEO's deputy, where he verifies his identity, and tells you "you're about to receive an email saying...".

Depends on if the CEOs deputy is in my management chain. If the CEO asks me for a status report it's weird, but sure, he gets it. But if e.g. the VP of a division not my own sends it, that's a different question.

This is such a non-issue in my opinion. The correct analogy would be that you receive a phone call directly from the CEO's deputy, where he verifies his identity, and tells you "you're about to receive an email saying...". In such a situation, I imagine the calculus would be different. Reporting it as a phishing attack would be malicious compliance or outright disruptive and you should expect to be on the CEO/deputy's shit list.

I'm sure there are a lots of things DOGE intends to do with this special project. Identifying the most disruptive federal employees is hopefully at the top of this list. The best strategy for any fed employee is to keep their head down and get lost in the hundreds of thousands of other low level fed workers. The email is brilliant because this stuff is like catnip to the most ideological of trump's enemies. They literally cant resist fighting back and "Resisting". It's truly a brilliant move.

Eeeeeeh. I'm generally pro-DOGE, but I don't think you appreciate the justified paranoia of the average federal employee or contractor. Because the relentless phishing attempts are truly out of this world. And it's not beyond the capabilities of our adversaries to take whatever email DOGE is sending out, and then create a phishing template out of it. The fact that Elon tweets so damned much about everything he's doing just makes this all the easier.

Add to that the fact that they get training monthly about cyber security best practices, usually with an emphasis on phishing. Add to that the typical level of incompetence in the government.

Thankfully this had nothing to do with national secrets, but I was at a federally museum in DC once. I had to scan a QR code to pull up the webpage to pay for tickets to a specific exhibit. I had a shitty old phone with a 3rd party QR scanner. Unknown to me, since I used it so rarely, the QR scanner had been turned into malware. I scanned the code, and instead of giving me the URL it represented, an ad appeared pretending to be the link I scanned. I only know this in retrospect. It took me to a suspicious looking website asking me to sign up for something with my credit card. Doubtful, I showed the person at the desk with the QR code directing people how to buy tickets. They squinted at it for a moment, and then confidently told me it was the correct website. It wasn't, it stole my credit card, I didn't get tickets, and they just shrugged. I had even showed them the website twice thinking that it really didn't look right. I should have trusted my gut, but my wife was riding my ass to stop being paranoid and just get the tickets already before they sell out, and our kid was hungry and bored. It was a frustrating lesson in trusting my gut and ignoring everything else.

I get phishing emails as a contractor literally every day. I work at a small company. I know literally everybody in the company. I know the people in these emails are fictitious. Sometimes I get emails "from" people who actually work at the company asking for shit it's nonsensical for them to ever ask for, with a replyto that's bullshit, or some url shortening link that they'd never actually use. Or other shenanigans. It never ends. I'd say I'd seen it all, but once or twice a year they come up with something new that really gives me pause.

Eventually you just get worn down, and you start to ignore everything that isn't from a known point of contact, preferably not even over email. Slack is preferred in my organization.

Ideally this is the sort of thing cryptographic signatures are supposed to be good for. "Email from the CEO asking us to buy gift cards? Did he sign it with a valid RSA key that is signed by our CA? No? Then I'll just wait for clarification."

Even though much of the infrastructure for this exists in the large organization I work in, it doesn't get used for the broadcast emails that go to everyone (actually, a small subset are, but only one department seems to care), even though it would seemingly be useful. But I suppose the crypto dream of the '90s will always be "the future" because normies non-nerds don't understand or appreciate it.

Just for the record, I work for the federal government and what you are wondering about is exactly what happened. Some of us got the email, others didn't, we all requested clarification from our supervisor, who immediately said "everyone hold up until I figure out what is going on." The commander said the same thing shortly thereafter, and about twenty four hours later we received the directive from very high up in the chain of command to not respond to the email at this time.

Exactly why I am feeling bearish on Trump. Internal enemies, exactly the issue his first term, seem to not have been dealt with. His underlings, perhaps even one personally chosen by him (EDIT: like Gabbard), overriding his will.

It's not internal enemies. What the fuck am I supposed with an email from "hr@opm.gov" that has never emailed me before? Asking clarification from my chain of command is the right and proper thing to do. If I had seen the email prior to all the news discussion, I would have assumed it was a phishing scam. The entire project was amateur hour from Elon.

Yes, DOGE efforts are highly irregular, and massively disruptive to government agencies. That’s kinda the point. Your analysis of the email thing is somewhat superfluous, because we already knew that the DOGE exists precisely to get the government out of the ruts it’s been stuck following. And, of course, nobody is surprised that many employees don’t like it.

Sounds like an attempt at percussive maintenance. I thought the whole point of DOGE was to get a team of smart outsiders led by a certified genius to fix government inefficiency - this is the opposite.

How do you know that this is opposite? How do you know that it is not the best, or even not a good way to tackle this problem? This sort of argument would be more convincing if there was an alternative way of going about doing this that was clearly better. Do you know any? I don’t. On the other hand, I know that Elon Musk has a track record of using very similar procedures across his companies, and in these cases, they apparently have been very successful.

I think that we will find out quite soon whether this was a good plan or not.

...

What do you think a 'certified genius' leading a team of 'smart outsiders' fixing government efficiency should look like?

I'm not sure, but I don't think it would all that distinguishable from what we are observing.

The guy already tested this approach in his Twitter takeover, it obviously worked (i.e. made Twitter VASTLY more efficient) there despite him having to adjust course a few times.

There's a great Patio11 Twitter thread about the repeated failures of government payroll modernization inititives.

On revealed preferences, every government suborg's primary objective is paying employees. In light of this, which no stakeholder is allowed to say out loud, the projects are invariably ludicrously underscoped. Everybody knows that there is a century or more of special spiffs and set asides and clawed out benefits. Everybody knows that there is no document or set of documents actually listing these; the function of the government entity is only actually described by the function itself.

You can't "play by the rules" and get anything done. Every inefficiency is someone's personal cutout. The agency will not simply allow DOGE to cut waste. DOGE has to force the agency to do it.

You can't "play by the rules" and get anything done. Every inefficiency is someone's personal cutout. The agency will not simply allow DOGE to cut waste. DOGE has to force the agency to do it.

The best way to do that would be to devise the appropriate plan and then get the head of the agency, the one selected by Trump, to supervise and execute it.

DOGE has to force the agency to do it and the worst conceivable way to force it would be by not having the direct leadership of the agency on board.

I'm not sure they are necessarily at odds. Musk seems pretty famous for prioritizing speed over getting things right the first time and yet this doesn't stop him from not only getting things right but getting them right faster than others. For instance, IIRC he spent millions on complex machinery for Starship before deciding that it should be made out of stainless steel and had to basically eat the loss; Starship is still poised to be the heaviest-lift reusable rocket ever built at a time when other reusable rockets are still struggling to compete with Starship's smaller predecessors.

Anyway, I don't take for granted that Musk is necessarily making the best decisions or the right ones in his newest venture, but I also don't think that "smart outsiders led by a certified genius" and "percussive maintenance" are at odds inherently.

OK, I've been a bit negative about this elsewhere in the thread, but this is understandable.

Still, if DOGE are prioritizing speed over getting things right, then it has to be open to feedback in order to get on the right track, even if it means eating the L. Much of the criticism here can be reframed that way -- hey they are quickly iterating and look, here's a strategy that didn't work.

I'm a huge fan of this Musk philosophy in his engineering ventures. Testing often-too-flawed engineering ideas as fast as you can is much cheaper and much faster than trying to come up with something flawless on the first try, and seemingly-ironically it tends to give you a less flawed final product too. I'm not sure how well that works with people rather than objects The fourth Falcon 1 wasn't working while scared that mistakes had been made that blew up the first three. The Falcon 9 landing engines weren't going to change careers because SpaceX tried out parachutes first. The machine-welded stainless steel Starship tanks aren't going to quit and find a job where composite tanks and hand-welded steel tanks don't get abused and wrecked.

I'm not sure how well the philosophy works with people. Federal government work in many cases is seen as a tradeoff: lower compensation than equivalent skills would get you in the private sector, but with better job security to make up for it. If he significantly cuts headcount without cutting output (or if Congress follows up with more deliberate cuts) then maybe making that deal worse is still fine? We'll have fewer interested applicants, but we'll also have fewer jobs we need to fill, so we won't have to raise pay to compensate for the drop in supply? But this isn't like an engineering experiment where the experimenter is the only one who learns something and failure is just one of the things we can learn; here the experimentees are learning too and failure can have more lasting consequences.

The DC suburbs are the richest in the country. What part of that indicates lower compensation?

It seems more like, instead of lower compensation, it's simply lower standards, and the job security incentivizes the layabouts, the malingerers, and the otherwise unsuitable who could not command anywhere near the same remuneration anywhere else.

Yes, yes, yes! People aren't engineering, although sometimes similar principles may apply.

It's interesting, low government pay is a complaint I've heard articulated before, and I think there might actually be something to substantially slashing personnel roles while increasing personnel pay.

Tulsi Gabbard is the latest official to tell her employees to ignore the email.

Musk is pushing his luck, right? It's only been a month and cracks are already forming among administration officials.

Musk is pushing his luck, right?

It has to catch up to him at some point. He's playing from the Tiberius Gracchus playbook. Either he will be assassinated by an insane person or the next Democratic administration will put him in solitary.

But imagine betting on black and winning every time 10 times in a row. At some point you must think you have plot armor.

I just hope he can defeat the blob before they inevitably get him.

In terms of his strategy, I think both he and Trump and throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. If they meet resistance, they move on, but they are relying on their greater energy and competency to overwhelm the defenses of the other side. They know they have 2 years to do this, 4 years max. The Trump coalition is unstable without the great man. No one can speak to the rubes like he can. So time is of the essence. And it's why the preferred strategy for the other side is delay. "Of course we want to increase government efficiency, but we just need to do it the right way", says the party that obviously doesn't want to increase efficiency.

Gabbard is not the blob, is she? I thought we were all bullish on her.

If someone with your values is pushing back on you, maybe this is one instance for actual mistake theory.

But imagine betting on black and winning every time 10 times in a row.

Not just that, but betting exponentially increasing amounts on black and winning while crowds of people are insisting that you'd be stupid not to quit or stupid not to bet on red.

I fear he's currently spiraling on psychoactive drugs or something, but trying to picture things from his point of view I don't see how someone with that personal history can manage to pull himself out of making mistakes like that before it's too late. Hypothetically, if you're Musk and you think extra ketamine just gets rid of those damn depressive periods, but people are trying to tell you that they're also making your manic periods reckless, why should you listen to them? Ignoring the naysayers always worked great before!

Ketamine has merit for treatment resistant depression. Now, I don't know what it would do for someone who is bipolar (Musk has claimed, and then denied, having it), but as drugs to try to solve your mental health concerns, there are worse.

I do expect that whatever he does want to use, recreational or otherwise, he has the best doctors money can buy nominally overseeing it. Not that he necessarily listens to them.

If he is on drugs, they are working great.

I recently learned more about xAI built Colossus, the supercluster that trained Grok3. It's amazing, and probably only Musk could do it in such a short time. Grok went from zero to top or near top in less than 2 years. And xAI is his like third or fourth most important project after SpaceX, DOGE, and Tesla.

Certainly this superhuman level of exertion isn't possible for much longer, but I'd never bet against him. It feels more and more that we're all just NPCs in whatever simulation he created.

So, I had a fun time reading Gibbon a while back. I don't feel like combing back over them to dig out the specific emperors, dates, etc. But the narrative he paints of the crisis of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century is basically the praetorian guard run amok. Every emperor was basically appointed if not directly by them, but by their assent to his rule. They expected generous bribes that increasingly bankrupted the empire, and at a certain point Senators were begging not to be made emperor because they couldn't afford it, and the praetorian kept murdering emperors that displeased them. Eventually Diocletian comes into power and "solves" the problem by subdividing the administration of the empire into such a labyrinthine bureaucracy that it's profoundly rare that anyone has enough consolidated power to rebel or murder an emperor.

Along the way, emperor's tried to "fire" the praetorians, or get the rogue and rebellious legions to come to heel. It generally ended in murder, a new emperor and a new round of "donations" to the legions. They could not be shamed out of enriching themselves. Pompey's cold logic from another age to "stop quoting laws to men with swords" always won out.

I think about this a lot with the current Trump administration. I think about it with all the profoundly powerful intelligence chiefs he's revoked the clearances of and banned from federal buildings. I think about it with the appointments he's sent in to reform the FBI, already breaking up the DC office and transferring thousands of FBI agents all across the country. I think about it with Trump firing so many top generals. There are a lot of powerful interest right now having the law quoted to them, and many of them have guns.

I don't know exactly where we are so far as the breakdown of our society. The call going out is that what Trump is doing shouldn't be allowed, is a "fascist coup", and stopping these powerful interest from being dispossessed from the levers of power is "saving our republic". I'm sure the men with guns having the law quoted at them might feel rather emboldened that even if the law isn't on their side, they'll still be on "the right side of history".

The last thing I think about a lot is how violent successions are in Roman history. Entire factions get crucified and their wives and daughters sold into slavery, all their property confiscated by the victor in the name of "the state". One way of reading about it is to be thankful we have peaceful transfers of power in our modern system. Another way is to wonder how much power ever really gets transferred if it's so peaceful. One rarely quotes law at men with swords and lives to tell the tale.

Another one of Diocletian’s innovations to circumvent the Praetorian Guard was to never set foot in the city of Rome and just rule the empire from Florida uhh I mean Mediolanum. This also allowed him to always stay with the army on the frontiers. One thing that got emperors into trouble during the third century is that they could either stay with the army at the German frontier to keep it from rebelling and keep the barbarians out, or stay in Rome to keep the Praetorian Guard under control. Moving the admin center closer to the border solved that issue.

All of the men who actually carry guns are trump supporters, or near enough. It’s progressives quoting laws to them.

How's that executive order to declassify records on the JFK assassination going?

The executive order says only that a plan for "full and complete release" is to be presented to the president, by February 7 for the JFK files, and by March 9 for the RFK and MLK files. It does not provide a deadline for the releases themselves.

Of course, as weeks elapse after February 7 and March 9, you can argue that the releases will never happen.

My guess is that the JFK files confirm that Oswald did it (or at least that the deep state genuinely thought he did) but the investigation into Oswald's background and history pulls in hard-to-declassify material about Cold War era espionage.

Of course, releasing JFK files which confirm that Oswald did it is a political loser for this (or any other) administration because none of the people looking forward to the files being released will believe that they are seeing the real files.

I find it kind of a weird idea to suppose there was a conspiracy capable of murdering a president and getting away with it but incapable of getting rid of the paper trail when given six decades to do so. If there is evidence for conspiracy in the JFK files, it will be entirely deniable circumstantial evidence, something like "this report was filed weekly except this one time in October 1963."

You're probably right.

I figure that Oswald likely did pull the trigger, but did so as part of a wider conspiracy/plot for which Jack Ruby was tying up loose ends.

New long article from N.S. Lyons in which he argues that Trump represents the end of the "Long Twentieth Century". Basically, his argument is that societies are experiencing a profound shift away from the "open society model" that was established after World War II. Trump marks the end of an era defined by an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, which were central to fostering progress in post-World War II societies.

I think it gives far too much credit to DEI and "political correctness" as examples of an "open society" and "individual liberation". They may well be outgrowths of such a movement for that, but they are cancerous outgrowths. Their tools and methods -- cancellation, punishment of speech, discrimination against individuals for being members of the oppressor classes -- are diametrically opposed to those goals. It may indeed be true, as many on the right say, that classical liberalism inevitably leads to that, but even if so, that means classical liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, not that those things are fulfillment of its goals.

This piece has some interesting and well-written and well thought out passages, but I can't help thinking the conclusion is just too extreme. Trump and his political equals or coalition members obviously represent reactionary push backs against a lot of the left-wing political and social overreach, but claiming that it's an end of the open society, liberal personal focus, global interconnectedness, forbidding to forbid, when that Trump coalition embodies a lot of them just to a slightly lesser degree than the most progressive 'liberal' forces in society reminds me of how any curtailing of Christian social pre-eminence is met with cries that they're banning religion in society, when opponents on the other side would claim that they're just slightly removing some of their domination.

Obviously it's possible that this only began 5-10 years ago and the author is exactly right, and that Trump not embodying every single idea of where we're ending up doesn't prove we aren't in that direction - and credit to the author for trying to write some history in the middle of it happening (a difficult thing to get correctly) but I remain skeptical for the above reasons.

Yeah, the track record of these types of works is bad. Prediction is hard, and authors who would write grand explanations of human history are almost always recency biased. Relevant examples include "The End of History" and "The Population Bomb" but you could pick pretty much any book in this category and it's the same.

That's not that these authors are uniquely wrong, only they don't have any explanatory power. They reflect the biases and thoughts of our current time, and will inevitably look silly in 10 or 20 years.

Great piece. I especially liked this section:

Mary Harrington recently observed that the Trumpian revolution seems as much archetypal as political, noting that the generally “exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his ‘warband’ of young tech-bros” in dismantling the entrenched bureaucracy is a reflection of what can be “understood archetypally as [their] doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such.” This masculine-inflected spirit of thumotic vitalism was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back. And it wasn’t, she notes, “as though a proceduralist, managerial civilization affords no scope for horrors of its own.” Thus now “we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere.”

I very much agree that most of the energy Trump and his supporters thrive on is archetypal, or "vibes" as is it less formally called. Generally just the idea that there is a band of courageous heroes fighting stagnation that makes it seem as if nothing is possible, that heroism is dead, and that everything in our lives is managed. I am very much a part of this energetic movement even if I am sometimes a bit concerned at where it will end up.

200-300 years of Caesarism says Spengler.

Though that's supposed to be gradual, so we probably are some decades into it now.

We’re seemingly at the first Triumvirate- Trump, Musk, Vance.

If the Chinaman is even in the 20th century apocryphally reluctant to make definitive statements French Revolution, it seems the American will less than two months into a presidency declare a new era.

Personally I would mark the end that time period on 2022-02-23. Not only are there a lot of 2's making it easy fir future schoolchildren to remember, but crucially it is the day Ukro-Russian War began. It marked the end of the peaceful cooperation of the West and Russia, the end of peace in Europe, the end of disarmed Europe.

Trump's legacy lies in the future, while the Chinaman is too cautious, the American much too eager. American judiciary is, unlike under FDR, eager to constrain the president. Then even the Supreme Court bowed down to the Executive, now each of the hundreds of federal thinks he obstruct the President. As we have seen already EOs are getting blocked, there is no telling if they will ever come into force.

The idea that after WW2 even looking only at the US the consensus until Trump's second term was anything resembling DEI is absurd. Segregation wasn't ended on VJ Day, Operation Wetback happened in 1954.

If people in 1945 US would be given a charitable explanation of the principles underlying DEI, and asked to come up with policies in-line with these principles, they wouldn't come up with exactly what DEI means in practice in 2025. Maybe they would even suggests policies which DEI advocates today explicitly oppose. This show that one cannot just view history as a sort of cableway up the mountain of DEI, but more like a walk on its mountainside: sometimes down to get up, sometimes up but quickly down, sometimes just down.

Personally I would mark the end that time period on 2022-02-23. Not only are there a lot of 2's making it easy fir future schoolchildren to remember, but crucially it is the day Ukro-Russian War began. It marked the end of the peaceful cooperation of the West and Russia, the end of peace in Europe, the end of disarmed Europe.

This seems to be recency bias in action. Unless it leads to nuclear war, the Russia-Ukraine war will be a footnote in history. It's a final pimple in the denouement of the Cold War: Russia's last attempt at global influence despite representing only 2% of the world's population and GDP.

No, the story of this era of history will be told with two letters. And it will change everything.

This is within the context of defining the "Long 20th Century". Maybe 9/11 fits better, it certainly is closer to the end of the actual 20th century. But I am not married to any of these events, and "recency bias" is something the article linked by OP is even more guilty of than me. The War started before Trump came into power the second time, and the consequences thus had more to manifest than for the former. And they have, meanwhile Trump's reforms haven't changed anything other than regularly scheduled denunciations by the Reliable Sources of the republican president.

I would argue the cultural 20th Century ran from the summer of 1914 to Christmas of 1991. The 21st century began on September 11, 2001. The 90s is a historical liminal space that serves as both an epilogue to the 20th century and the prologue to the 21st.

Great comment, I think you’ve convinced me. There was a lot of really weird stuff about the 90s, from the eXtrEme monster truck era to weirdly grotesque trends in western cartoon animation, all the way to that end of history emptiness of suburban prosperity thing, which you saw especially in 98/99 in American Beauty, The Sopranos, Fight Club, the Matrix to some extent, all of which gets more interesting the more you think about it.

Trump has not yet abolished FDR's America, but he's making a serious attempt on it, and that alone is extraordinary (especially in light of the fact he failed to do so the last time around).

Whether he succeeds and solidifies his win will be the true test of whether we entered a new era. But even if he fails, it's hard to imagine by which miracle the legitimacy of the managerial state could be revivified at this point.

Who knows what's going to happen, but we certainly stand at one of those crucial points in history, and the protagonists are well aware we are.

Trump isn't trying to abolish the New Deal. The main radical thing he is trying to do is to abolish the nominally apolitical permanent civil service - including bringing the USPS back under political control. That takes you back to the immediate post-Civil War era before the Chester Arthur administration and the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.

The stakes are a lot higher when Federal spending is 25% of GDP vs 1.5% in 1883.

But of course, the whole reason we're here is the civil service is not apolitical, but 90% in the bag for one party. Even if Trump replaces whole departments with political appointees, the federal government will still be a Democrat-dominated institution.

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