The newly created US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, is recruiting. According to their tweet last Thursday, they are in search of “super high IQ small government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamourous cost-cutting”.
Cool – 80-hour weeks, in the hands of “revolutionaries”. It’s a carbon-copy of Dominic Cummings’s 2020 call for “weirdos and misfits” to come work in Downing Street and overturn the establishment from within, poor hygiene guaranteed along with poor decisions.
Cookie-cut chaos and try-outs, Liz Truss’s economic neutron bomb of 2022 was like a desert test-blast for Musk’s own far-bigger assault on the US economy and intention to impose “hardship” and cause markets to “tumble” (creating even more discontent and fertile soil for the far-right) and by extension, hardship for the world.
Donald Trump’s version two ‘tariffs and screw you’ to its allies in NATO is surely a more confident furthering of the economic and political isolationism of Trump version one, but much more so mirrors the UK’s Brexit in which we ‘heroically’ flicked the Vs at the European Union
Symmetries, parallels and mirrorings as part of a special relationship gone very wrong.
All things American end up in Britain, but there used to be a lag; series and films like Dynasty and Star Wars took months to ship across to British shores, although political and economic capers: the US scolding of the UK over Suez, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s grand free market smash-up, ran parallel in real time.
Now we see this relay race of both sides trying out something the other watches and rejigs. The wafer-thin Brexit referendum win was like a test drive for Trump’s razor-thin swing-state wins in 2016 and 2024.
Referendums and elections won on the war stoking of nationalism, and billionaire elites stoking and trading off the anger of the Rust Belt left-behinds they profited from destroying in the 1980s and 1990s, while proclaiming across countless TV, social media platforms, radio stations and newspapers that they own of a ‘censorious cancel culture’ – a fake complaint amid their own fake news and conspiracy theories. If they don’t like the election results, they’ll announce postal vote fraud, assault the Capitol, have #FarageRiots, or demand another ballot just months later.
Mass-produced, top-down chaos
Over in the US they may well get chaos and more mirroring by simple means of installing the worst possible person to head the department you want to damage the most: So while Gaetz has, er … been dumped from heading justice *ahem ahem*, Cadet Bone Spurs, again commander-in-chief, installs a panoply of anti-candidates: known security-risk Tulsi Gabbard runs intelligence; health under the helm of an anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist, to name but two.
This is mass-produced, top-down chaos – the British-release model maybe tweaked for the American market and vice-versa, but that’s just the US-UK version of the same one-size crashes-all global jalopy, making for poetic parallels and mirrorings amid a torrid spectral dance.
Steve Bannon
A ball observed through the looking glass of the guy who’s curated and corralled so much of it, Steve Bannon. Seen on the panel with Liz Truss, calling Tommy Robinson a hero, taking thanks from Nigel Farage for Cambridge Analytica’s efforts in Brexit; Bannon bigging up Farage to lead this ‘convening authority’ for his international ‘nationalist-populist’ front along with Viktor Orban and Narendra Modi, even in early 2024 calling him ‘perfectly positioned’ to become the next PM.
Liz Truss argues that Britain needs its own Trump, rendering redundant headlines like “Can Liz Truss Bring the US Far Right’s ‘Politics of Destruction’ To The UK?”.
A plan already long in train, the irony and the idiocy of British ‘patriots’ carrying Trump flags or even the most dyed-in-the-DNA ‘superior’ British patriots wearing America First MAGA hats: America First, screw everyone – Britain first. The far-right sucking up to the wrong side has a long history.
Nigel Farage
But will it bear fruit for all? For all Bannon’s plans, recently we saw the elected MP for Clacton pitifully plea to be the ‘go between’ ambassador for HMG and Trump. Unlike the US, Britain’s ambassadors aren’t rewarded for political loyalty but come from the diplomat corps (notwithstanding the hypocrisy of him decrying Labour activists canvassing for Kamala while actively inviting Trump’s meddling over the Chagos Islands).
Farage’s behaviours don’t mirror so much as further his restlessness: when he was in Europe, he wanted to be in the Commons; now he’s in the Commons, he wants to be in Washington. He comes across as an unhappy man. Thoughts and prayers, as they say in the States, or as we say here, “oh dear how sad never mind”.
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