Elon Musk's departure from Washington was celebrated by many in the media, who in the space of just a few years transformed him from a "Yay Science!" rocket-building Tony Stark stand-in doing awkward cameos on Rick and Morty into a crazed inhuman boogeyman, whose cars must be keyed, firebombed, or layered with bumper stickers saying "I bought this before Elon was a Nazi". (Before you say that's an exaggeration, there's literally a Tesla with that sticker in my neighborhood — you can buy them on Etsy.)
The rapidity of Musk's arrival, his whirlwind attempts to impose some kind of corporate fiscal responsibility on intransigent government, only to find himself sinking in the morass of bureaucratic backlash, depression, and frustration amounts to what political observer John Ekdahl describes as a speed-run of Republicans' failure pattern:
Yet the same leftists who at this moment are celebrating Musk's step away from politics — viewing it as a harsh lesson that "when you mess with one bureaucrat, you mess with all of us" — may come to regret the way they treated this moment in the future. DOGE's mission was still fundamentally advisory in form, empowered only to the degree The White House wanted it to be, and pushback against its movements from members of Congress could actually have an impact. The media played up the approach as chaotic, which it looked like from inside and out, but it was also vulnerable to political and public pressure. When Elon's group touched things that had defenders, backers on Capitol Hill or elsewhere could brush them back.
What lesson will the right's fiscal hawks take from DOGE's limitations, then? Are they going to throw their hands in the air and just give up on cutting government spending? Will they stop caring about the gargantuan levels of waste and fraud Musk's team identified just because without touching popular entitlements, it won't be enough to balance the budget?
Of course not. For as much as an alternate fiscal view is ascendant at the moment on the right — the economic populists held a celebratory gathering at the National Building Museum just last night (an interesting look at that here from Ian Ward), where J.D. Vance took umbrage to being described as an intellectual — the fundamental position of conservatives on the need to cut government isn't going away. DOGE Subcommittee Chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her Freedom Caucus friends represent far too significant of a portion of the party conference on the Hill to shift the GOP away from at minimum the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility that is such a familiar muscle memory.
So what lesson will they take away? Perhaps the most obvious one: the problem with DOGE is that Elon Musk wasn't powerful enough. It is a mirror image of the position the American left has held for a century, from the days of Woodrow Wilson to fond desires do be "China for a day": what if we just had a strongman, free to act to make all things right?
Elon Musk is a brilliant man, but he didn't know Washington. Imagine what would happen if he did. Imagine if someone comes along who does, and wields the power to do it.
If that ever happens, the post-DOGE right may turn out to be the left's boogeyman made real.
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