The Fifth Risk

 Michael Lewis - of The Big Short fame - wrote a book about the early Trump administration of 2017 called The Fifth Risk. The basic idea is that Trump and the GOP want to hollow out the 20th and 21st century administrative state. As Josh Marshall notes, this desire to hollow out the state bureaucracy is the one common thread uniting the factions of MAGA, Christian Nationalism and Muskovite techbros. 

Basically, Trump 1.0 failed to achieve what it wanted because America has a government built on the premise of avoiding harm. This does have the effect of making it inefficient, but that inefficiency is part of the design. It prevents too much power accruing in any one spot and therefore distributes public goods more fairly. Think of the DMV. Everyone has to wait in line; it's very democratic.

If Musk and Trump are successful in hollowing out the administrative state, then we are screwed for the foreseeable future. There will be some Katrina level catastrophe or worse. There will be a 2008 crisis or worse. As long as we have elections, that should lead to Democrats winning control of the government. Even after that happens, you will have to de-Trumpify the government and replace his loyalists with qualified people. Qualified people might be hard to find, given how they are being treated by the Republican Party.

One of the great delusions of the techbro, libertarian right is that government is some sort of burden, when in fact it smooths out so much of lives travails. The ease of 21st century life is invisible, because we take it for granted that the power stays on, the drinking water is clean, the road are paved, the schools are open, air traffic is safe, the dollar is sound. Musk and Trump's plan imperils all of that.