Amidst Nationwide Protests, Dem Leadership Is Lacking

“There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” — Curtis Yarvin, rightwing blogged/“philosopher” who’s influenced Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and JD Vance, in 2012.

“We are witnessing the methodical implementation of a long-planned strategy to transform American democracy into corporate autocracy. The playbook was written in plain sight and is now being followed step by step.” — Gil Duran, independent journalist

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes was perfectly clear. “This nation is at an incredibly dangerous moment and it is all the more dangerous if people don’t understand what is happening,” she said on Feb. 10. “There is an ongoing coup against the Constitution of the United States happening as we speak.”

It’s commonly said that Congress holds the power of the purse, which is true, but somewhat vague. Mayes spelled out specifically what Congress has not just the power, but the responsibility to do:

Congress authorizes the work of federal agencies and allocates funding to them. The elected representatives of the people are supposed to exercise oversight to ensure that these agencies operate within the bounds of the law, serve the public interest, and are held accountable for how they use taxpayer dollars.

She went on to state the obvious:

But today Congress is nowhere to be found. Donald Trump has grabbed the power of Congress and handed it to an unelected billionaire and a group of teenage hackers. The richest man in the world is now running roughshod over the authority of federal agencies in violation of the rule of law and the Constitution.

While far too many national Democrats dither — and by dithering, normalize the ongoing coup — Mayes spoke directly to what is going on.

Republicans hold majorities in Congress, and so could pass Trump’s policies into law Constitutionally. “But they know the American people don’t support what’s happening,” she said. “They don’t support eliminating the Department of Education. They don’t support canceling funding for law enforcement and public safety. They don’t support canceling health care funding. So instead Donald Trump has decided the Constitution doesn’t matter and he has handed power to Elon Musk to do whatever he wants without accountability, without oversight and without the consent of the people.”

A coup, simply put, is a theft of the power to rule. But not all coups are created equal. And if anything, Mayes understates the extremity of the Trump/Musk coup that’s unfolding — a coup that far too many national Democrats are in deep denial about. Because they aren’t just trying to pass highly unpopular legislation. They are trying to end democracy entirely.

With Elon Musk running the show on the ground, a five-point plan is unfolding that’s been around for a while in rightwing tech circles, as independent journalist Gil Duran reported on his substack, The Nerd Reich:

1. Install a CEO Dictator
2. Purge the Bureaucracy
3. Build a Loyalist Army
4. Dismantle Democratic Institutions
5. Seize Media and Information Control to Maintain Power

The plan derives from rightwing tech blogger Curtis Yarvin, whose influence on Musk crony Peter Thiel and Trump’s VP JD Vance was highlighted by Rachel Maddow last October, on the eve of the vice presidential debate.

Maddow first played a clip of Vance telling a podcaster in 2021, “Step one in the process is to totally replace — like rip out like a tumor — the current American leadership class, and then reinstall some sense of American political religion.” As for how to do it, Vance goes on to say, “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things.”

Maddow then played a clip of Yarvin in 2012, talking about DOGE (Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency”) but with a much more honest acronym — RAGE (Replace All Government Employees). But that was only part of Yarvin’s vision, which is to “delete the government,” as if it were a phone app. And not just the government, but also NGOs, universities, and other unnamed entities partly funded by the state. In their place, Yarvin promised smooth sailing in the hands of talented generalists “who actually know how to run things” topped off by a CEO, “And a national CEO is called a dictator. It’s the same thing. … If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

This is what Vance was alluding to — not “making America great again” but making it feudal England again — or perhaps even ancient Rome. Or Sparta. (Certainly not Athens.) At the time of the 2012 clip Maddow played, Yarvin was already internet famous, via a pseudonym, as a leading proponent of the neoreactionary movement, which aimed to replace democracy with some form of authoritarian rule — absolute monarchy, feudal/aristocratic monarchy or some form of state-as-corporation, the variant Yarvin personally favored. It was widely viewed as a quirky cult obsession at the time. There were stories about them in Techcrunch in 2013 and The Baffler in 2014, but not much more. “The neoreactionaries do seem to be influencing the drift of Silicon Valley libertarianism, which is no small force today,” Corey Pein prophetically wrote for The Baffler. But his words went unheeded, even as their influence spread.

Presenting this material on the eve of the vice presidential debate should have made some kind of waves, and to some extent it did. But it didn’t have any noticeable effect on the debate itself. Indeed, Tim Walz, who made his national reputation calling out people like Vance as “weird,” went out of his way to stress finding common ground for well more than half of the debate. Maddow herself expressed uneasiness in even bringing up the material she shared, and it was that uneasiness, rather than Vance’s extreme anti-democratic views that appeared to dominate. That, in turn, allowed Trump and Vance to win a narrow popular vote margin as millions of 2020 Democratic voters simply stayed home.

But it wasn’t simply that Vance a few years earlier had endorsed some vague anti-democratic fantasy. Yarvin had close ties to Musk crony Peter Thiel, who in turn had bankrolled Vance’s whole career, including his run for U.S. Senate, and as Duran just recently explained, Musk’s DOGE operation closely tracked a more specific, updated blueprint Yarvin laid out more recently in 2022.

“What once seemed like a fringe theory is now being carried out by the corporate powers that have wholly captured our government,” Duran wrote, laying out the following summary of what they share in common:

1. Install a CEO Dictator

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Trump appoints a CEO to run the country like a private corporation, bypassing Congress and the courts.
• Musk’s Moves: Acts as federal CEO, demands unilateral control over sensitive government programs, positioning himself as an unelected decision-maker as Trump stays in the background.

2. Purge the Bureaucracy

• Yarvin’s Plan: “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE) – fire career civil servants and replace them with loyalists.
• Musk’s Moves: DOGE is gutting teams, demanding mass resignations, locking employees out of offices, and threatening mass layoffs in federal government. Meanwhile, DOGE is recruiting inexperienced young men who owe their loyalty to Musk/Thiel.

3. Build a Loyalist Army

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Recruit an “ideologically trained” army to replace experts and enforce the new regime.
• Musk’s Moves: Surrounding himself with young, inexperienced loyalists who enforce his will without question. Project 2025 will also provide Republican cadre to run what’s left of the federal government.

4. Dismantle Democratic Institutions

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Strip power from federal agencies, courts, and Congress, centralizing authority under the executive branch.
• Musk’s Moves: Undermining the credibility of the federal government, downplaying legal oversight, and defying regulatory authorities. Dismantling government agencies and functions with no plan for their replacement.

5. Seize Media and Information Control to Maintain Power

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Take over government, journalism, academia and social media to control public narratives.
• Musk’s Moves: Buying Twitter, firing journalists, boosting propaganda, and promoting fringe narratives while attacking traditional media. Leading the hostile tech takeover as Trump’s “CEO.”

The parallels are so striking and consistent, they’re impossible to ignore. There are other factions involved in Trump’s coalition, to be sure: most notably the “spiritual warfare” contingent that sees Democrats and RINOs as demons, and the Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 contingent that is much more detail-oriented than Musk/Yarvin/Vance is, and talks of putting government workers “in trauma” so they want to quit, rather than wholesale firing them outright.

But these other factions are clearly in the back seats right now. And this simple, straightforward gameplan that Duran summarized should be the framework for any journalist writing about Musk and DOGE going forward — as well as for Democratic Party officials and activists. It makes the depth and scope of Trump’s threat to democracy crystal clear, which is key to opposing it, as political scientist Neil Abrams, who researches such things, explained on his substack, The Detox, in December.

Neither the legacy media nor the Democratic Party seem up to the job of stopping Trump, Abrams wrote, because they failed to recognize the threat for what it was. The media was hobbled by “its delusional conceit of providing ‘balance,’” while the Democratic Party “remains stuck in its self-imposed prison of performative bipartisanship and bland, kitchen-table priorities.” While the latter has shifted somewhat since then, there’s still an ambiguity similar to how he describes Viktor Orbán opponents in Hungary:

“Torn between considering his reign in terms of ‘bad government’ or as an illegitimate system,” Bálint Magyar observes, Orbán’s critics have come “nowhere close to a diagnosis, not to mention a cure.”

This stands in stark contrast with the Ukrainian example, where Viktor Yanukovych was clearly seen as an arbitrary tyrant, and was driven from power. “Whether the Democratic Party will follow the failed approach of the Hungarian opposition or the successful one Ukrainian democrats used remains to be seen,” Abrams concluded.

While Democratic party leaders still seem to be dithering, pressure from below is ramping up significantly.

The second wave of 50501 protests—dubbed “No Kings Day” on President’s Day—turned out thousands of protesters in capital cities across the country, with hundreds and thousands more in other cities and towns. From Kodiak, Alaska to Key West Florida, from Honolulu, Hawaii to Augusta, Maine they showed up to defend democracy under siege. Locally, there were demonstrations in North Hollywood and Long Beach along with the main demonstration in Downtown LA. As new specific outrages pile up daily, if not hourly, the fuel for future protests only intensifies.

Attorney General Mayes is right. There’s an ongoing coup. And it’s the responsibility of all Americans to do everything possible to stop it. Time is of the essence. The people have been stepping up. It’s well past time for politicians to do the same. We need to be like Ukraine, or else we will end up like Hungary—or worse.