DOGE Isn’t Conservative — It’s Radical Arson

Burning down institutions in the blind hope that something better will rise from the ashes is a revolutionary, time-tested recipe for ruin.

Image generated by Grok (only fitting).

This article is a guest post by Mike Burke.

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There was a time when conservatives understood that stability is precious, that institutions, once dismantled, cannot simply be reassembled. Conservatives used to recognize that destruction is easy, but rebuilding from scratch is arduous. Now, those who once claimed to defend order, tradition, and prudence are embracing chaos, oblivious to the abyss opening beneath their feet. Today, the political right, addled by grievance and seduced by the call to “take back America”, have abandoned conservatism and become modern-day Jacobins.

Conservatism, in its truest sense, is about preservation. It values the institutions that sustain a nation, refining them where necessary but never razing them in pursuit of ideological purity. Edmund Burke, the 18th-century political philosopher and father of Anglo-American conservatism, foresaw the bloodshed in the fevered radicalism that led to the French Revolution. The revolutionary faction known as the Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre, believed themselves wiser than history — and they drowned France in a Reign of Terror for their hubris. A little over a century later, the Bolsheviks repeated this folly in Russia, promising utopia through destruction, only to leave famine, mass graves, and totalitarianism in their wake. Now, in the name of “efficiency”, the newly-minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is busy gleefully hammering at and torching the foundations of the US government. The result, as throughout history, won’t be (techno-)utopia, but ruin.

At DOGE’s helm stands Elon Musk, a 21st-century revolutionary armed not with a tribunal but with unelected carte blanche and a social media platform, recklessly assuming that a leaner, purer state will simply emerge from the wreckage of toppled institutions. DOGE was billed as a means to curb waste and restore discipline to a bloated federal bureaucracy — a cause many conservatives might instinctively support, given the more than $36 trillion in debt looming over America’s finances and a government often derided as sluggish and profligate. Its champions argue that DOGE could save billions or even trillions, slashing red tape to unleash economic vitality — an alluring vision of small government that echoes the Thatcherite zeal of the 1980s. Yet what we see today is not thoughtful reform, but an ideological purge, hacking away at institutions with all the childish abandon of boys kicking down sandcastles.

Instead of carefully surveying and then streamlining bureaucracy, DOGE has turned the federal government into a battlefield of indiscriminate cuts. The mayhem goes far beyond the headlines about foreign aid and USAID being fed into a “wood chipper.” Entire technology teams at the General Services Administration have been gutted. The IRS faces massive reductions that will cripple tax enforcement, letting fraud and evasion run rampant. FEMA, already weakened, has lost hundreds of staff. These are not minor cost-saving measures but sweeping acts of destruction — ones that will have consequences far beyond a few delayed paychecks or missed government reports. By the end of 2025, DOGE aims to fire 200,000 federal employees and cut $1 trillion in government spending. Are some of these jobs unnecessary? Is some of this spending waste? Certainly. But when your only tool is a flamethrower, vital institutions burn alongside bureaucratic bloat.

History is filled with men who believed that tearing down institutions was the first step toward progress. Robespierre was convinced that the old order had to be annihilated before a just society could emerge. The Bolsheviks thought they were cleansing corruption when they shattered their economy. Each time, radicals mistook upheaval for strength but found that once the wrecking ball had done its work, the paradise they envisioned never arrived. Musk’s DOGE follows a similar script. It promises efficiency but provides only arson fueled not by far-left zeal, but blithe, technocratic arrogance.

The damage is already mounting. The IRS, which has struggled under years of underfunding, had a backlog of 16.9 million documents by mid-2023. Further cuts will only make the situation worse, enabling the wealthiest tax evaders to slip through the cracks while the average American’s taxes are automatically deducted from their paychecks. What happens when the CDC, already under political pressure, finds itself unable to track outbreaks, letting a bad flu season spiral into catastrophe? What happens when a stripped-down FEMA faces the next major hurricane, superstorm, or wildfire? Katrina in 2005, Sandy in 2012, and the California wildfires of 2018 and 2025 have already shown the price of an unprepared state. How many more lives must be destroyed before the cost of this vandalism becomes clear?

But dysfunction is only the beginning. A state weakened in this manner does not simply become inefficient — it becomes corrupt. When the UK slashed police funding in 2010, violent crime surged — knife attacks rose, and organized crime flourished in the vacuum. We saw a similar pattern in the US in the wake of the misguided “Defund the Police” movement in 2020. A crippled IRS will not simply delay refunds; it will open the floodgates to tax evasion. The $600 billion annual tax gap between taxes owed and paid on time will balloon as fraud runs unchecked. And, as always, it will not be the billionaires who suffer. They will retain their loopholes, their accountants, and their means of escape. It is the ordinary citizen who will be left holding the bag.

This chaos, of course, has its beneficiaries. Musk’s own empire stands to gain should his government-backed blockchain fantasies come to fruition, to speak nothing of the conflicts of interest and billions in federal contracts his companies are securing from the government he is tasked with overseeing. And America’s rivals — namely China and Russia — are watching with interest as the foundations of the US state erodes. The sad irony is that, as with so many revolutions, many of its most ardent champions will be the first to suffer when the system they dismantled fails to protect them.

This is not merely a crisis for conservatives — it is a crisis for all Americans, and really for the world, given geopolitics and the global economy. When the institutions that hold a nation together are shattered, the consequences are far-spanning. Broken or demolished institutions do not ask if you are a Democrat or Republican before withholding tax refunds or allowing pandemics to spread. A hollowed-out FEMA will not consider whether you are a “real American” as floodwaters rise. This is not about left or right. It is about whether the American state will remain capable of governing at all.

Conservatives once understood this. They were the guardians of order, the stewards of institutions, and the voices of restraint and caution in the face of radical impulses. They recognized that while reform is necessary, stability is paramount. They saw that government should be efficient, but still functional. Now, too many have become the radicals themselves, enthralled by a Silicon Valley Jacobinism, mistaking upheaval for strength beneath the banner of Musk’s meme revolution.

Destruction is the easy part. Any fool can set fire to a house. The real test is in preserving what matters while pursuing careful, measured reform. That is what conservatism was meant to be. Instead of gambling everything on a fantasy of a purified, skeletal state, true conservatives should demand responsible governance — a government that is efficient, yes, but still capable of fulfilling its essential functions.

Those who cheer for DOGE are not conservatives. They are reckless, vindictive ideologues, the contemporary disciples of Robespierre. But history is clear on what happens to revolutionaries who mistake destruction for progress. The guillotine, after all, never spares its own.

See also: “We All Live on 4Chan Now”

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