Lately, political writers have called attention to the tendency of billionaire Elon Musk to refer to his political opponents as โNPCs.โ This term comes from the gaming world and refers to a nonplayer character, a character that follows a scripted path and cannot think or act on its own, and is there only to populate the world of the game for the actual players. Amanda Marcotte ofย Salonย notes that Musk calls anyone with whom he disagrees an NPC, but that construction comes from the larger environment of the online right wing, whose members refer to anyone who opposes Donald Trumpโs agenda as an NPC.
Inย The Cross Section, Paul Waldman notes that the point of the right wingโs dehumanization of political opponents is to dismiss the pain they are inflicting. If the majority of Americans are not really human, toying with their lives isnโt importantโmaybe itโs even LOL funny to pretend to take a chainsaw to the programs on which people depend. โWe are ants, or even less,โ Waldman writes, โbits of programming to be moved around at Elonโs whim. Only he and the people who aspire to be like him are actors, decision-makers, molding the world to conform to their bold interplanetary vision.โ
Waldman correctly ties this division of the world into the actors and the supporting cast to the modern-day Republican Partyโs longstanding attack on government programs. After World War II, large majorities of both parties believed that the government must work for ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net like Social Security, promoting infrastructure projects like the interstate highway system, and protecting civil rights that guaranteed all Americans would be treated equally before the law. But a radical faction worked to undermine this โliberal consensusโ by claiming that such a system was a form of socialism that would ultimately make the United States a communist state.
By 2012, Republicans were saying, as Representative Paul Ryan did in 2010, that โ60 Percent of Americans are โtakers,โ not โmakers.โโ In 2012, Ryan had been tapped as the Republican vice presidential candidate. As Waldman recalls, in that year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a group of rich donors that 47% of Americans would vote for a Democrat โno matter what.โ They were moochers who โare dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.โ
As Waldman notes, Musk and his team of tech bros at the Department of Government Efficiency are not actually promoting efficiency: if they were, they would have brought auditors and would be working with the inspectors general that Trump fired and the Government Accountability Office that is already in place to streamline government. Rather than looking for efficiency, they are simply working to zero out the government that works for ordinary people, turning it instead to enabling them to consolidate wealth and power.
Todayโs attempt to destroy a federal government that promotes stability, equality, and opportunity for all Americans is just the latest iteration of that impulse in the United States.
The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence took a revolutionary stand against monarchy, the idea that some people were better than others and had a right to rule. They asserted as โself-evidentโ that all people are created equal and that God and the laws of nature have given them certain fundamental rights. Those includeโbut are not limited toโlife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The role of government was to make sure people enjoyed these rights, they said, and thus a government is legitimate only if people consent to that government. For all that the founders excluded Indigenous Americans, Black colonists, and all women from their vision of government, the idea that the government should work for ordinary people rather than nobles and kings was revolutionary.
From the beginning, though, there were plenty of Americans who clung to the idea of human hierarchies in which a few superior men should rule the rest. They argued that the Constitution was designed simply to protect property and that as a few men accumulated wealth, they should run things. Permitting those without property to have a say in their government would allow them to demand that the government provide things that might infringe on the rights of property owners.
By the 1850s, elite southerners, whose fortunes rested on the production of raw materials by enslaved Black Americans, worked to take over the government and to get rid of the principles in the Declaration of Independence. As Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina put it: โI repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that โall men are born equal.โโ
โWe do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments โderive their just powers from the consent of the governed,โโ enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. โAll governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.โ There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, โ[b]ut we twelve hundredโฆnever asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.โ
Northerners, who had a mixed economy that needed educated workers and thus widely shared economic and political power, opposed the spread of the Southโs hierarchical system. When Congress, under extraordinary pressure from the pro-southern administration, passed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that would permit enslavement to spread into the West and from there, working in concert with southern slave states, make enslavement national, northerners of all parties woke up to the looming loss of their democratic government.
A railroad lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, remembered how northerners were โthunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reachโa scytheโa pitchforkโa chopping axe, or a butcherโs cleaverโ to push back against the rising oligarchy. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were โstill Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.โ Across the North, people came together in meetings to protest the Slave Powerโs takeover of the government, and marched in parades to support political candidates who would stand against the elite enslavers.
Apologists for enslavement denigrated Black Americans and urged white voters not to see them as human. Lincoln, in contrast, urged Americans to come together to protect the Declaration of Independence. โI should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop?... If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!โ
Northerners put Lincoln into the White House, and once in office, he reached back to the Declarationโwritten โfour score and seven years agoโโand charged Americans to โresolve thatโฆthis nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedomโand that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.โ
The victory of the United States in the Civil War ended the power of enslavers in the government, but new crises in the future would revive the conflict between the idea of equality and a nation in which a few should rule.
In the 1890s the rise of industry led to the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy, and once again, wealthy leaders began to abandon equality for the idea that some people were better than others. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie celebrated the โcontrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer,โ for although industrialization created โcastes,โ it created โwonderful material development,โ and โwhile the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.โ
Those at the top were there because of their โspecial ability,โ Carnegie wrote, and anyone seeking a fairer distribution of wealth was a โSocialist or Anarchistโฆattacking the foundation upon which civilization rests.โ Instead, he said, society worked best when a few wealthy men ran the world, for โwealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.โ
As industrialists gathered the power of the government into their own hands, people of all political parties once again came together to reclaim American democracy. Although Democrat Grover Cleveland was the first to complain that โ[c]orporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters,โ it was Republican Theodore Roosevelt who is now popularly associated with the development of a government that took power back for the people.
Roosevelt complained that the โabsence of effectiveโฆrestraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.โ Roosevelt ushered in the Progressive Era with government regulation of business to protect the ability of individuals to participate in American society as equals.
The rise of a global economy in the twentieth century repeated this pattern. After socialists took control of Russia in 1917, American men of property insisted that any restrictions on their control of resources or the government were a form of โBolshevism.โ But a worldwide depression in the 1930s brought voters of all parties in the U.S. behind President Franklin Delano Rooseveltโs โNew Deal for the American people.โ
He and the Democrats created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure in the 1930s. Then, after Black and Brown veterans coming home from World War II demanded equality, that New Deal government, under Democratic president Harry Truman and then under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, worked to end racial and, later, gender hierarchies in American society.
That is the world that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are dismantling. They are destroying the government that works for all Americans in favor of using the government to concentrate their own wealth and power.
And, once again, Americans are protesting the idea that the role of government is not to protect equality and democracy, but rather to concentrate wealth and power at the top of society. Americans are turning out to demand Republican representatives stop the cuts to the government and, when those representatives refuse to hold town halls, are turning out by the thousands to talk to Democratic representatives.
Thousands of researchers and their supporters turned out across the country in more than 150 Stand Up for Science protests on Friday. On Saturday, International Womenโs Day, 300 demonstrations were organized around the country to protest different administration policies. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is drawing crowds across the country with the "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Hereโ tour, on which he has been joined by Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers.
โNobody voted for Elon Musk,โ protestors chanted at a Tesla dealership in Manhattan yesterday in one of the many protests at the dealerships associated with Muskโs cars. โOligarchs out, democracy in.โ
