The .
Feudal .
Future .
Podcast . Hello and welcome to another episode of the Feudal Future Podcast . I'm Marshall Toplansky , I'm Joel Kotkin and today we are delighted to have Sean Steele with us . Sean is the National Committeeman for the Republican National Committee . Welcome , sean , thank you .
And we have Professor Luke Nichter , who is a professor of history at Chapman University and head of our presidential studies program . Welcome , luke , thank you .
So today we want to talk about what is on everybody's mind , which is DOGE , the Department of Government Efficiency , and we want to talk about the precedents for that and what the hell is actually going on with that . So , joel , you want to kick us ?
off with the first question . I mean , the first obvious question , I think particularly for Luke , is is there any presidential precedents for this kind of action ? I mean , I remember when I was working for the Democratic Leadership Council . You know we had the reinventing government . I assume there's nothing quite like what we're seeing now .
So I think , you know , any good historian can probably take us back to the ancient Greeks , but I'll keep it a little more modern . You know , I would say I would say it this way , in some ways yes , in some ways no .
You know , I think in the post-war era , since world war II , something along these lines has been tried maybe a half dozen times , and sometimes it's focused on one particular area , sometimes it's the national security reforms , sometimes it has broader ambitions .
But I think , you know , I think the end result of each one of these efforts Republican and Democrat , under different circumstances is the ends were pretty limited in terms of what they actually accomplished . David Letterman with his hammer and you know , sort of you know we're going to get tough .
I'm in a really aggressive stance where he smashed a government ashtray you know , on David Letterman and my 18 year old students say what's a government ashtray ?
No idea .
But it was it started . It was this big , it was reinventing government .
It was revolutionary .
But in the end to your point , I mean , I think they sort of gutted like the general . You know the GPO , the government printing office , and you know there were modest proposals elsewhere , but I don't think it was revolutionary .
Well , sean , looking at it from your perspective as the National Committee for the RNC , is this a entirely politically motivated effort , or is this something that you think has broader roots ?
to it . It's definitely much broader . Elon Musk is not much of a political theorist by any means . He's an A to B guy , very , very direct . This is certainly it's political , but , moreover , I think it's cultural and social . He is taking the great angst of the great middle class in America and you know what has been going on all these years ?
Where is this money going ? Nobody knows , nobody understands . Very few people can actually comprehend the numbers . I'm one of them . I mean , you just sort of give up and fall into an abyss . Musk is one of the few people on this planet that actually understands numbers and distances and time and space .
And for him to volunteer to do this , this was an integral part of the campaign . This isn't a surprise if the folks and I do believe fundamentally there is a deep state . It's a culture of people that believe that they're smarter than the rest of us . They live in Washington DC , they live in the wealthiest suburbs in the country . They live differently .
They have servants taking care of them , they don't work in the offices , they work remotely . So they live in a bubble and their information outside information is extremely limited . I know that . I know that personally in my family . I know that personally . How you know , I've been going to DC and that's why it's not a healthy , good place to live .
So the bottom line is that unveiling how government works , where its money is going from , and the inside dealing , it's just , it's beyond fiction . I mean , nobody could write a fiction of what the USAID has been involved involving in deep political campaigns in America , including my wife's , by the way .
I made that connection with NPR and LAS and it's just unbelievable , the connections and the self LA Eston , it's just unbelievable , the connections and the self-dealing , and that's just a small slice of life .
Well , you know , it's obvious that Trump and the Republican Party tapped into this underlying feeling of distrust and feeling of angst on the part of the middle class . I mean , you just wrote an article that I thought fascinating about how Doge is really a war on the clerisy , which is kind of what Sean is saying . Right , this is a class warfare issue .
Right , because what you know . My point is that you have a class of people , not you know . First of all , the clerisy is a big group . It's like the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages . There were the bishops on top . The average parish priest wasn't doing so much .
So I think one of the things I think politically is a danger is you can say , well , they're laying off the poor postal worker , or they're laying off the clerk who's the only support for their family , where the real target really should be at the bishop level and maybe multiple .
Well , you'd be surprised with the number of bishops in Washington .
DC .
I'll throw this out . I don't know if Joel can verify this or not , but we did a lot of field work I mean intense field work , 220,000 doors in the last campaign in Northwest Orange County and what I discovered is that a lot of homes are owned by government employees . I was stunned and astonished .
I used to think it was like carpenters and plumbers and professionals , but I saw teachers , government workers buying . They're the new middle class . If you think there's a private sector middle class California is quickly diminishing . We have a replaced middle class that are making at minimal two incomes usually over a100,000 a year .
And they are able to buy the stuff that the old middle class created .
Yeah , we just finished a study on the role of government employment in terms of overall employment growth in California and the level of growth was three times higher in California for both federal , state and local employees which is interesting , and they were paid about twice the median income . Yeah , so we're looking at bloat right , we're looking at bloat .
So over to you on this .
Luke Is this a history .
Where's it been bloated before ?
Yeah , I mean Joel touched on something that I find fascinating , that I think about because you know , obviously I'm conditioned by my news feeds every day and react to those just like everybody else . But I'm always trying to step back . And what's the 50-year trend ? What's the 500-year trend ?
There's something clearly going on , I think that's anti-elite , anti-establishment . But is there something bigger going on ? Is there some kind of political realignment going on ?
It's going to be the broader question , like in the 1960s or 70s , with so many Democrats begin to shift voting patterns in the late 60s , like my own family , we're all practicing Catholic Reagan Democrats .
Basically , we grew up in a purple household in Ohio , and so the thing I think about is , you know this , the this public support in the heartland for initiatives like Doge is the same kind of support for Trump himself . He's tapped into this fuel source where he hasn't . I think the media often blame Trump for putting fears in people .
I think he knows how to take advantage of those fears , but those fears were already there and there's some longer trend . Maybe it's back to 9-11 , where , I think , out in the heartland , a lot of Americans and working Americans see that repeatedly their tax dollars have gone to bail out the elite and establishment .
After 9-11 , it was the airlines and other industries . After the Great Recession , it was the mortgage industry and bankers investment bankers For people on the heartland . These are people who have much more in life you know , materially , than they do . These are people who you know more recently it's healthcare , you know and frontline workers .
These are people who save up all their money for that one family trip to DC , who take their kids when they're of age to visit the monuments . They go to all those great museums and cultural institutions and when they do those places , those institutions some of our best in the country insult them . They insult them for driving an SUV .
They insult them for not being aware of their carbon footprint . They insult them because they're they're , they're patriotic and they shouldn't be proud to be Americans . And so there's some something's going on right now , but what I'm interested in is what's the broader thing going on in the background ?
That , I think , is hard to articulate , but it's an important fuel source , not just for Doge but the whole Trump movement .
So what you're saying is they shouldn't call it the Department of Government Efficiency , they should be calling it the Department of Government Insularity .
Well of course it's not a department and efficiency is only perhaps one part of it . I mean , I'm thinking almost in terms of , like , negative liberty and positive liberty . I think the first cut they're going in and subtracting things the government shouldn't be doing . But then the part that I want to know how do we innovate beyond that ?
How do we solve the important problems ?
No , I think this is a key issue and the nice thing that's happening is that it's spreading throughout the country and mostly in red states . It's a good model and everybody's going to be doing it differently . That's what a federalist system's designed .
It'll be happening in some purple states , but it's becoming a not just one unit , one department , one scandal , but an entire overall , business-like approach , and that's what makes it exciting . A lot of mistakes are going to be made . They fired a bunch of nuclear scientists on some level and they hired them the next day , and that's inevitable .
But the fixes are quick .
Well , you know , you brought something out which I think is worth all of us sitting down thinking about , which is how does this fit into the really longer trend of life ? Is it like 500 year world ? And I'm thinking , is what we're seeing really the play out of the Industrial Revolution's reordering of society in the 1800s ?
My thesis would be that in the agrarian world , people relied more on themselves , right , and when they organized themselves , they organized themselves into small groups to be able to get work done . When the industrial revolution came in , suddenly the scale increased for how we needed to organize ourselves , and that's where the hierarchies started to come in right .
It wasn't just property owners , it was now managers of people , managers of capital , managers of industries , and it's gotten so big and so bloated that Government is just a reflection of that . And so , now that we're in a world where we have the economy being driven increasingly by data , by people who don't have to actually coordinate in the same way anymore .
They can work remotely , they can , in essence , kind of democratize the economy . Is this really just kind of the natural play out of it ?
kind of the natural play out of it . You know , the image I have is imagine the working family sitting around their kitchen table looking , trying to balance their checkbook and they say to themselves we have no idea how we're spending our money and in some cases we're spending our money and it's directly hurting us .
Like stop it , we need to figure out what's going on here . Like we need to get control of this . And they don't even know where to start . It's so out of control . I can't imagine any person or family operating that way .
You go back further in time than me , but my last book was on the 1968 presidential election , I think , which has very strong parallels to this past year , whether it be a surprise late withdrawal of a president from a campaign , surprise vice presidential succession and awkwardly running on change and continuity at the same time , which is almost impossible in politics .
Um , and third , stronger than usual third party or populist movements and and in this case it wasn't . You know , in 68 it was george wallace , now it's the person in the white house , it's donald trump , and so I think there's something , some longer term evolution , I don't know . It's the same kind of realignment . I think his history terms of history .
When you're in the eye of the storm , you lack the perspective to see what's going on . One day it's all going to make sense . We're going to look back and we're going to say , oh , it's perfectly linear .
Why didn't we ?
see it . We can't see that yet because we don't know how it's going to end . Even Doge , I sort of withhold , I don't really know . I know barely more than what my news feeds tell me and I don't know how it's going to end up .
But I think the idea certainly has the strong support of a lot of americans , certainly in the heartland well , it goes back to friedman in a way , and at least in terms of looking at the government , what it does , melton friedman , yeah , yeah , is there another one ?
okay , yeah , of course , of course . The famous one I always think of is that there's nothing more permanent than what is a temporary government solution or whatever Exactly .
But it's the cost benefit analysis and Reagan introduced that into government accounting in a very , very big way and we've we've gotten away from . That was a temporary way of looking at it still is encrusted in law . We even have that in California law cost benefit , cost benefit and then they dress it up in all sorts of ways .
This is a radical expansion of that idea . And what is the benefit here and who's getting the benefit ? And there's a lot of smart people and , let's face it , it's going to be big tech or the technology plus AIs .
Explain oh so USAID is funding X dollars to a distant country that actually hates us and is actually financing the terrorists , and that doesn't make any sense and that's the kind of exposure and that's the other thing . Is this the radical decentralization of media ? Look what the white house did just in the last 48 hours .
You guys established a legacy media which is diminishing in the market share . You can leave for a while . We're going to rotate a guy that's got a uh , you know , 300 000 uh listeners , uh , on his podcast like us ? yeah , no exactly , except this is going to be really really big that .
And I would just say I'm only aware of sort of one time in recent history where anything on the scale has been proposed , and it was the nixon second term the new federalism nixon proposed a full government reorganization where he wanted to realign government departments not with their traditional constituency but really with their function , and make and really compel
Congress to reformulate the jurisdiction of its committees to align with the executive branch structure . I mean really sort of a radical idea and it ultimately didn't go anywhere . Because of Watergate he didn't have that full second term to experiment the way that he wanted to .
But ironically a lot of his advisors were people like Pat Moynihan and others who had become disenchanted under the war on poverty and had been present at creation in the Kennedy and the Johnson years , which created a lot of federal bureaucracy . So I think Nixon is probably the closest and of course that's the case that never happened .
Well , you know , you think about just roll the tape forward a little bit to where we are today and the Supreme Court is basically saying look , the executive branch has the perfect right to be able to say these are my policies . You've invested in me the right to , or the obligation to , actually execute on policies .
I should have the right to put my people in that are going to execute those policies . So I think that maybe if Nixon were alive , he'd probably be pretty happy with that Well the genius is .
I'm not happy with Nixon , but that's a side note . Yeah , wage and price controls never got me going . Yeah , no , well , you're a free market guy ? Well I try to be . You're a free market guy , well I try to be .
Trump is kind of retooling that entire thinking about tariffs and such , and seems to be beneficial in many respects , especially against perceived enemies . No , what I'm looking at is that Trump . There's a genius here working and I haven't quite got my finger on it , but flooding the zone is very helpful . I mean , things are changing every few hours .
You know what has he just done with the press conference with the world leader ? I don't know what he said and what kind of deal he's making , but I'm going to find out in about 50 minutes . That has taken the left completely by surprise , and Doge is just one of them , and he's also a master of misdirection . Let's talk about Canada in the 51st state .
It's an absurd idea , everybody knows it . But on the other hand , he's making .
You know , he's got half the uranium deposits in the UK , except that my wife's family is in Canada and now they don't want to come to the United States .
So well , but the evil genius question is kind of an interesting one , right .
Well , and , I would add , at a time when the Democrats really lack focus and leadership , where I'm seeing even people you know there are , you know .
So I interview a lot of people from the south who still consider them to be southern democrats and and they are all around and they better do it fast , but there are still lbj democrats there are still sort of wallace democrats or clinton democrats are still around and when you talk to them and they get done complaining about trump and they get done complaining
about republicans , they sound like republicans and so I don't really care what they call themselves . But you know there , there , you know there , there there is a movement toward the center and the the . You know the . The point that I was going to make is is um , uh , you know you mentioned Reagan earlier .
You know , I think the Reagan committee , the Reagan attempt to reformulate , led by a prominent Democrat , you know , in bit business , estimated that a third of the incoming tax money on April 15th was going to government waste . And so , you know , just as I , as a rational human being , I wonder is Doge going too far ?
Do they have the right to do some of the things we're talking about ? Because right now it's much more talk than action ? How much does Congress need to be involved ? You know , in cases where statutes are involved , not just EOs , that were being overturned , and I feel like every time I wonder are they going too far ? Are they doing the right things ?
Are they going to make because they're going to make some mistakes , as you said , then they pull this rabbit out of a hat , of these cases of waste , fraud and abuse that , if they're accurate , no one can defend .
Well , and is Congress afraid to actually be a check mechanism here ? Because it strikes me that the political cost you pay as a Republican Democrats are already out of the equation , but the political cost you would pay as a Republican to go against it and ask logical , critical thinking questions , it's very strong cost . How do you deal with that ?
Especially because if you listen to someone like a Pat Buchanan who's still around logical , critical thinking questions , it's very strong cost . How do you deal with that ?
especially because if you listen to a someone like a pat buchanan who's still around , uh , you know he would say both parties have been big spending parties since the bush 43 years including donald trump sure , yeah right .
The deficit went up significantly under trump one , although , although biden certainly outperformed him all of them but you know , see what I see really .
You know , this is my training in both Marxism and Weber is that this is a class issue , that there is a large class of people At the top . It's about power , young people with degrees in environmental studies and gender studies and other .
You know , uh , trafe , um , you know that that that is um , trafe means non-kosher to our Gentile audience , um , but , but but the .
The bottom line is that that that , that the , the people really , I think , have a sense that their job in the government , their job at working , let's say , or even in like DEI or ESG , is the only good job they're ever going to have .
All their friends are baristas at Starbucks , and so the ferocity of this reaction , I think , is also a class dynamic , not just at the very top , but at all those people for whom the only possible employer they'll ever have on , given the education they have .
So let me bottom line this for you , right ? Okay , people want to feel like they're more in control of their lives . Right and right now , they don't feel like they're in control of their lives because they feel as though they've got this gigantic bloating world out there that has kind of loaded the dice against them .
Is this going to give people a feeling of more control over their lives ?
Depending which people you're talking about Exactly . And in Berkeley , I lectured there once a year , alan Ross's class , undergraduate political science . I'm the token Republican , so I take a survey every year how many here plan to work for the government .
I'm just curious , and about 10 years ago two-thirds of the hands rose and I said that's a shame and it's pathetic and it's embarrassing , and you guys are smarter than that . Your futures are limited . It's not good . And so I give them my two cents .
This , this year and again very unscientific . It was a third and I said I congratulate you .
I hope you get out there in the private sector . There's no future in the government and you know , obviously , pay attention there's no future in washington , that's for sure .
But you got better talents and you can create and do things and have a better independent life , and I'm trying to convince my daughter to leave washington and and go to so , in other words , I think there's a shift taking place , even among those that think this is as far as they're going to get . I'm going to be an environmental activist .
You know what does that mean ? I mean all these I've had people come to my office . One had a gender studies degree and she couldn't do anything and I felt sorry for her . She was ripped off and conned all those years .
You see , it's an accrued and paid $250,000 in tuition for the privilege of that it's embarrassing , and she said she had a great time in school .
Well , yeah , so did I . But you know you got to pay attention and study once in a while and do something socially useful . So I think that's the great see , that's the social impact . We look at those , we see how corrupt it is . We see the insane spending . There's going to be a lot of indictments .
The good news is Harmey Dillon did very well in the Senate hearing yesterday . She'll be chief of civil rights . That's the crown office within the Department of Justice , and our city attorney , Michael Gates , is going to be her number one assistant . Oh , that's interesting , michael has no , he'll be there on Monday . I'll see him on Tuesday , he'll be .
He's very good at firing people , so it's a whole nother universe of extremely smart people , and there's a shift not only in the top leadership . But what I'm more interested in is the middle leadership , the institutional , the deep state , the permanent class .
Well , let me ask you guys this question If you listen to the flip side arguments that are out , the permanent class , the natural pendulum swing will come back and people will be so pissed off at what they've of how they've been dislocated that they will become in the ascendancy .
I think that's true . I think the folks in northern Virginia as a rule are going to be very upset , and the rest of the country doesn't give a damn .
Right . What do you think about that ? Is this we live in a world of cycles . What's your sense ?
Yeah , in a world of cycles , what's your sense ?
Yeah , I mean , when I talk to people who are , who consider themselves clinton democrats , had a long conversation with someone who's been a clinton supporter in little rocks since 1991 and and I feel like you know , going back to your carville example , it's almost like we're back to the 60s in the sense that they're very proud democrats , they identify as democrats
but they sort of refer sort of out of body as . But then there's that national Democratic Party . They differentiate between kind of their own values and what they have locally and that was common a lot . You could be , for example , a Wallace Democrat but you weren't a national Democrat and it's almost kind of changing regionally .
There's some kind of a shift going on , but Carville is saying sort of lie low . But you know Carville saying , you know , sort of lie low . But he's also criticizing new leadership in the party . I mean , what was one of the proposals they passed recently is three days bereavement If your cat died .
You know , as a government worker , you know , and I think that's again to the person in the every hour on a farm , he's like you . Just those kinds of policies in the cities people just can't relate to . In other words , what he's saying , I think , is they haven't learned yet from 2024 and they're digging themselves deeper into a hole .
Well , how did the Republicans figure it out ? Because it's not like the Republican party was didn't have regional differences back in the last couple of decades .
Well , Trump has been the great transformer , and I was one of those that was very cynical . Who's this guy from New York ? He doesn't even talk American . You know he's got a New York accent .
Hey , I can't personally .
Yeah , well , I reiterate that I have the perfect dialect Kansan California .
So that intent , that and a dime will get you right on the subway . That's right , I mean , I think . I think we were both in Cleveland in 2016 . Yeah , I was .
Sergeant of Arms .
I feel like the feeling was almost like you know these this Trump entourage these strained people . It was a takeover . You know , sort of the I . You know , I think they're friendlies but we don't really know a lot about them . No-transcript shift is that you compare sort of the first trump term to now ?
Yeah , kind of the different approach that they're taking , because I feel like there was a , there was a national narrative in the first term , even for people who consider themselves loyal republicans , that you were a disloyal american if you were to serve in that , that administration .
Yeah , yeah and I think , I think that lot of you couldn't wear a Trump hat in 16 . You do today on campus .
And I think and you couldn't get a job coming out of the Trump administration ?
Oh , absolutely no . You get indicted . You lose your body license . The point is that Trump has changed the culture across the board about this America . First thing was not a sham . It appeals , and what he's doing right now it's 80 20 , 80 20 the issues that are popular voter id 80 20 . Men competing in girls sports 80 20 . He's .
That's the one that he's that's that's that's the highlight . No , we got 16 new ones coming up in california . Saw it today 16 new black caucuses adopted , 16 reparations in California .
Good issue .
Yeah , great , issue 2080 . So the point is that the Dems continue to flee from reality and the mainstream stuff is working well . Will it work two years from now ? Will Trump be able to keep the House ? Carville's predictably not making a bad prediction ?
There's a chance that things can get disassembled and things could get explosive , but so far you know , you can keep holding your breath and you're going to get blue in the face if he keeps being successful .
And I would also just add , while also people don't believe what the mainstream media are telling them . You know , in much greater numbers than even just during the first . Trump term are telling them . That's , you know , in much greater numbers than even just oh .
Yeah , during the first trump term and I think I you know as a whole I think the average person had a really difficult time interpreting trump and understanding him the first term and I think we've progressed a little bit , but at least we understand , not to take him literally .
You know those 3 am tweets , you know we process him much differently than than the first time , and so I think the combination of things , while also Democrats being leaderless and not knowing which direction they're going to go in . You know , I still don't think that sort of the working class are necessarily natural Republican voters .
I'd like to go back to Doge for a second . What's accomplished is that this is not impossible information to get . This is something that's easily disclosable . Whether or not he fires people or not , I think it's great . Actually , the attrition is going to solve the problem itself . People are going to look at us .
Oh my God , I had five bullet points of what I did last week . That's impossible . I can't possibly do that and they'll have to quit . And , of course , you know , fogged a mirror .
Got some coffee .
And so the point is that this is going to be easier for independents all over the country . Smart people I'm thinking of my new hero , big Balls I mean smart 19 year old kids that can go ahead and unlock this stuff , start publishing and start talking about it .
And so this , this , this , this imperial city with these giant walls that no feudal people could possibly penetrate , is now wide open , and we can see it published and have a lot of questions about it . That's integrity and that's democracy .
Well , you know , I'd like to focus on this integrity question because one of the things both of you talked about is kind of the unpredictability of Trump and how it appears sometimes that he's mercurial mercurial in his thing , so like , for instance , ukraine , to suddenly turn around and say Zelensky was the aggressor and started the war and as a dictator .
After years of the narrative going the other way , leaving aside what the actual facts might be right , it just seems like . It seems like it stokes the notion that we have a transactional president . I think that's what we have .
We have a .
I don't think he's hiding that at all , but he said this morning I reported . I asked him did you see ? He was a dictator last week and Trump's answer was just classic . Did I say that ? Did I ? Did I really say that ? Honest to god ? I , of course , and and the beauty is misdirection look at that shiny penny over there . I'm really .
Yes , canada needs to be the 51st state . Meanwhile , he's getting , he's getting greenland right and he and and he's getting you know rare minerals in the ukraine and , with the funny thing about this mineral thing , I don't know where it's going to go . It's a nice idea . It's going to get 50 percent . It's going to help Ukraine create stability .
A much closer relationship between Ukraine and the United States is exactly what the Ukrainians want and need . But half those minerals are a problem . They're on the Russian side . So how is he going to deal with that ? He's going to say Putin , you know what , you got my stuff .
You got to move back 10 miles . Okay , cause that's my stuff there . So that's , that's just Trump .
So you've got the , you've got the , the sensibilities of the Queens accent , but maybe you don't have the accent as well as some of us do , but but , but , the but , the message is very Queens like well , but it's , it's like it's , it's you , you're , you're calling it crazy like a fox , right , right .
Do we have a precedent of crazy like a fox ?
Well , I don't know . I mean we've never had a president quite like Trump . I mean there are elements of sort of Nixon or Andrew Jackson or someone like that On the table is . Is there really a method to his madness ? Because I mean the strategy .
You know , one of the common threads I think through a lot of the breaking news has been often he would make some suggestion and policy that's so outrageous or odious that it forces constituents often closer to the problem to get serious about proposing a problem .
So you threaten to take the Panama Canal back , and it seems like the Panamanians have canceled some of the most egregious contacts now with the chinese . You threaten to take canada or mexico , and now it seems like they have port . They take border security more seriously . They take fentanyl trafficking more seriously .
You threaten to take greenland , and denmark has increased its security . All of europe appears to be contributing more to its own defense .
That's objective .
That's absolutely true , Just because he started disrespecting Two days ago he posted on True Social this AI-generated video of a future rendering of Gaza , which looks something like a cross between the Las Vegas Strip and maybe the French Riviera . But what does that prompt behind the scenes of these other stakeholders in the region ?
We better get serious and come up with a solution , because this is in our backyard .
Well , until people don't take him seriously anymore , right , and that's the question I have is has it run out ?
But there's a good point . But he has the force and the impact and and you're right , it's still early . What , what , what is the defense department going to do ? The Chinese are , you know , shooting missiles all around Australia and you know being . You know what's he really going to do ?
And you know he's , I think , adding tremendous value and credibility to the United States power and he's using that nakedly and obviously he's not just carrying a big stick , he's , he's , he's prepared to use it .
So well , in fact , we are a force to be reckoned with . Yeah , so you , you know , if you're looking at , are you , you know ? Are you bluffing with a pair of deuces ? You know , no , we're not bluffing , we have , we have some serious aces in our hand .
Well , it's like both the europeans are in the position now where you know they , they say well , you know , we don't like what you're saying about defense . Well , you , you've chosen to be to have no defense .
But now they're talking about a European army . Now that was never on the table just weeks ago . What a European army to actually protect themselves against their enemies ? The United States is not going to be the fallback . And Trump has so many tools , what is it ? 50 bases , hundreds of thousands of American soldiers , and so ?
So he's got a lot of tools and he doesn't have to exercise all of them . And he's very coy to use naked power very coy . But he does it at the right time . He had Xi with him in Mar-a-Lago in his first term . He's having dinner . He says , excuse me , I got to leave a couple of minutes .
And then he comes back and he shows him on his iPad yeah , we're shooting missiles right now in Syria , bombing their chemical plants . So that wasn't an outrageous war move , but the timing couldn't have been better . It was all designed to oppress Xi and people behaved during those four years .
So I guess the question just is is Doge a big mistake ?
for Trump ? Oh God no .
Or is it ?
It's a future . It's a future . This is . You know , ron DeSantis is already talking about doing his own dojo and he's probably got the best run state in America , and a politician that doesn't adopt it today , at least in the next political cycle or two , is a fool , because everybody wants to know what's going on . Where's the money going ?
Why are the taxes so high ? What are you really doing with that ? Money Goes back to LA . Karen Bass , you know you're spending billions on homeless . We can get more . Are you serious ? Does that make any sense ? Of course it doesn't . Everybody knows it doesn't . Even Governor Newsom says it doesn't .
So we need Doge everywhere and basically we need radical disclosure . Don't hide it anymore .
So maybe just to wrap things up , Luke , where do you think this is going from a historical point of view ?
It's interesting , you know . So I I agree on sort of the trickle down effect in some of the states . It seems like Texas is considering elements , I think Columbus , ohio is considering some elements , you know . So the in terms of going back to the big picture , obviously some , some specific things are going to be accomplished .
Some government functions are going to be subtracted . We're going to have to replace them , some things are going to be added , some innovation is going to be required .
But to me , what extent is this issue ultimately used , doge , does it become a new kind of political movement as a result , a broader way to organize people and and and gather and maintain political power ?
And that's that's the point that I'm speaking to is , is there a broader movement going on right now and we just simply can't see it because we are in the eye of that storm , and it probably ?
won't be called Doge right , because , because you know the mainstream media is attacking a concept , a name and the branding , but the brand will be different , and , but , but , but . The brand will be different , and , but , but , but . The content will be plain , obvious . We're going to have , you know , real everybody's talking about .
You know , having an open-mindedness and and and transparency . Well , this is precisely what that object is , and very a bad politician be one that would oppose transparency .
Well and you can have the idea of dismantling pieces of infrastructure , is maybe a great first step , but really where this process ought to go is the adoption of business processes on an ongoing basis with whatever infrastructure you've built , to be able to actually bring the cost down and be able to allocate the funds to something else .
My big worry is that and if you look at adopting this at the state level , especially in our wonderful state of California that's so efficiently run , the , the main costs that we have to deal with , are baked into things like public employee pensions . How do you deal with that ?
Right , if you look at the private sector and how they have dealt with that , they privatized the pension industry . They basically said , okay , 401ks , we'll buy you out of your pension . Do you see that happening in the federal level , too ? Do you see it happening also in California , as ?
a move . I don't see that happening in California and I think the only solution is going to be total and final bankruptcy when there's absolutely no more money . So you're a fireman , you're living in the South coast of France , you get those nice checks and one day the money stops coming and then you know there's a problem .
Uh , but on on a , on a more national level I think you're going to see a lot of reform on that and it's , it's getting pretty obvious . A lot of cities face bankruptcy . In California , basically on pensions , basically on my two favorite constituents , uh , cops and cops and firemen Right , and it just , and that's over half the budgets in many of the cities .
A big , substantial part of their budget is just paying off the pensions and it grows every year . It doesn't contract . So that's another issue . And you know , again , disclosure to disclosure , most people are paying city county tax . They have no idea it's going to pensions .
Well , and I think the underlying strategic question here is you know , can the government , can we afford to keep doing the things that the government's doing ? And the operating assumption seems to be no .
So if the Clinton administration called it re-imagining government , I think this is coming much closer to raising the question what does it mean to re-imagine government , and what does government look like when you come out the other end ? And I think that's a that's a conversation that I think we need wide input .
I think Americans are more tuned into than ever before , kind of in the heartland , and I think that really is the strategic question . It's not the news headlines of these people need to get fired . The government shouldn't be doing DEI . It's what does ? What should the government be doing ?
What does it look like when it's done ? Well , what an interesting discussion . Yeah , do you guys have any other ? Are you optimistic ? Are you pessimistic when that's , I think , a good way to end .
No , no , I , I'm , I'm very much on the optimism side . I think Trump's message is carrying well . He's quite lucid . I mean , how can you not want to listen to his news conference ? And you know he's got more executive orders coming on we've ever seen before . It's usually very smart politics across the board .
So in that sense , politically , he's making some very good moves . But in terms of long-term structure , I think he's changing the language . He's taught Republicans , for example , to work , to be comfortable with working class people , people that make things with their hands . That was never true when I was growing up .
It was kind of the country club , professional merchant rancher , you know the Lincoln model . But now it's shifted quite a bit and now we have that middle class greatly under attack . But now we have new allies , the working class . That's a pretty form , that's a pretty formidable coalition . Nobody's been able to do that .
Reagan touched it on a bit , but , but Nixon did too too , to some extent that's true , that's true , but but on a massive scale .
I think trump is had it regionally , but not you know now he's getting young black males and latinos are moving significantly .
This is I had one uh , black , uh politician tell me in california if , if , african americans , california don don't vote at least 90 , what ? 85 , 90% for the Democrats statewide , they can't win . Well , trump's got it down to , you know , the Democrats down to 80 , 75% . He's picking up the end . So that is a major revolution .
That's the key pillar of the Democrat Party . So young African males , african-american males . I'm very optimistic about the consequences and the imitators and the ones that want to follow in those steps .
Yeah , and I , I think , I think , I think it's constructive is the word that I would use . I think it's constructive for Americans to learn more where their tax dollars go to , on how the government works . I think they're probably going to do some right things . I think . I think they're probably going to make some mistakes .
They're going to realize they went too far in some areas . They're going to realize they could have gone further in some areas .
When it's all over with , they're only going to get one shot at this and if the lesson of history is , this has been done a half dozen times since the 1940s and none of it's really been a thorough audit of the government , as some call it , I think that's constructive .
If nothing else , people become closer to their government and , I think , become , I think , more accountable of public officials .
And reengaged right , Because people feel very removed from government and from civic engagement . Well , Sean and Luke , thank you for some just really penetratingly interesting insights . Thank you so much and thanks for being part of the Feudal Future podcast .
The Feudal Future podcast .