in every story The new class-conscious Republican Party looked a lot like its old self last December when Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission for the fledgling Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE). “Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” Ramaswamy complained. “The dirty little secret is that a lot of that money doesn’t even reach the people it was intended for.”
Once again there is “entitlement” reform. During his presidential campaign, Ramaswamy called on Donald Trump to position DOGE as a beachhead in a spending war, arguing that executive power should be used to cut “wasteful” federal spending without congressional approval. (Ramaswamy later somewhat messyly left his co-chair position to run for governor of Ohio, but President Trump officially established the interim agency within the White House in one of his first executive orders.)
DOGE mimics the language of Silicon Valley slide decks, but is nothing more than a meme-ized version of well-trodden right-wing austerity politics.
Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, currently DOGE’s sole leaders, have cut what the company calls “efficiency.” But what they offer makes little sense. Musk said he would cut $2 trillion. How will that change? ~ no Destroy a program that Trump promised not to kill? The billionaire didn’t get an answer and later walked back his goal of deeming $1 trillion an “epic result.”
“Entitelements” originally had a very different meaning.
Musk offered the same logic that underpinned his calls for cuts in the past. In other words, tough love is good for poor people. He agreed at a town hall at Here he bears a strong resemblance to former House Speaker Paul Ryan. road to prosperity The budget proposes cutting Medicare and Medicaid and repealing the Affordable Care Act to offset tax cuts for the wealthy, and states in 2023, “I do not believe that hard-working Americans should have to pay for all of our social services.” “Like former Congressman Matt Gaetz, who said, “Couch Potato” in “Service”.
Entitlement originally had a different meaning. When Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted Social Security in 1935, the program was promoted as “social insurance” that Americans “earned” and “deserved.” But Republicans have subverted the meaning of these programs by associating them with the concept of dependency—lazy people asking for handouts, aka “entitlement” culture.
Although this argument goes back centuries, the core of the discourse came during the New Deal and its aftermath. In the 2019 book Free Enterprise: An American HistoryProfessor Lawrence B. Glickman explained how Roosevelt’s critics divided the nation into “productive makers” and “unproductive takers.” Unlike the labor movement of the early 1800s, where the “makers” were workers and the “takers” were businessmen, free market advocates “turned the image of class war on its head.” From this perspective, opponents of the New Deal argued that taxes were theft. Forced to support welfare, “wealthy people declared themselves victims,” Glickman wrote.
Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, says anti-rights ideas were solidified in the backlash against the civil rights movement of the 1960s. “In 1967, most stories about welfare and poverty were portrayed in pictures of black people,” she said. This laid the foundation for Ronald Reagan to claim in 1987 that government support had “made millions of Americans virtually wards of the state.”
The party has consistently found rhetoric suggesting that the poor are to blame for each new crisis. When the Tea Party took over the Republican Party, the biggest frustration was that “taxpayers” were supporting undeserving people. Mitt Romney almost had a similar “47%” sentiment about the White House.
This “free enterprise” mentality has taken on a strange texture as venture capitalists have risen to the forefront of the GOP. Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen pointed to the New Deal as Roosevelt’s “personal monarchy.” He said we need a Caesar-like CEO in Trump to break FDR’s grip.
Given the recent New Deal backlash from the upper class, the task for the left goes far beyond lawsuits against DOGE. In other words, how to return “qualification” to its original meaning. In Williamson’s view, mainstream liberals have failed to show how good government can be. She says progressives need to start promoting a different version of government “efficiency.” That means adopting policies that improve the lives of ordinary people and protect them from the overly wealthy and self-proclaimed DOGE boosters.
