Beware The People Resigning From DOJ
A Take Based On History
As a history nerd, watching some pretty crucial history play out in my lifetime is both scary and exciting. To be clear, the scary part is living through an obvious constitutional crisis when the normies on the street have no effing clue it’s happening. This shit rarely ends well for republics.
But the scary stuff also can lead non-normie observers to make severe misjudgments, especially because fighting the scary stuff day-to-day can induce a nasty myopia. Partisans get caught up in the daily outrages and can’t see around the next corner, leading to the sorts of strategic and tactical errors that make these historical turning points so famously unpredictable.
One such aspect is the people who end up on the “losing” end of any given day’s battle. In particular, I’m thinking about all those people resigning from the DOJ right now, as well as the FBI and various other branches of the civil services under attack from DOGE right now.
If there’s one thing history teaches you, it’s that these people don’t just “go away”. Some of them do, but many don’t. Look no further than Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, who a good 15+ years ago were definitively on the outs from polite society.
What I see right now is a group of highly-skilled, highly-motivated lawyers, professionals, and more, who are all of a sudden out of work. Some will land cushy positions in private industry, and never poke their heads up again. Some will push to positions of power and/or use their pre-existing power to protect themselves and claw back justice from an unjust crackdown. Some will just start fighting, right now.
Elon may have a decent engineering sense — the truth probably lies somewhere between the mythos his fanboys believe and the mud his enemies have thrown on him — but like much of the modern right, he’s a victim of a faddish culture of pop-historical sophistry that rarely rises above the level of, “ZOMG Sparta was so KEWL”, and is simply unequipped to understand anything else about history.
Which is why he doesn’t see what he’s accidentally creating right now. History is full of guys like him who think they understand a system, and set to “fixing” it, only to have it blow up in their faces because they didn’t see the next thing coming around the corner at them.
That’s not to say that I know how this is all gonna turn out. Sometimes, the Musks get lucky. Henry VIII was like that — he bumblefucked his way through a whole series of self-made crises that he should by all rights have lost, instead of somehow skating along. But Henry also sowed the seeds of later crises through the enemies he made, both personal and institutional.
Elon is doing that right now. Expect a second act from a lot of these people losing their jobs right now.
"Expect a second act from a lot of these people losing their jobs right now"
We'll see what that second act is. I imagine you're thinking there is going to be some second act, some recoil, and hope it doesn't have too much bad, stupid, counterproductive stuff in proportion to needed corrective stuff.
But I look at your second act prediction and see it as extraordinarily hopeful, almost delusionally so.
I see reasons for the all the people you describe getting disrupted to "get mad" and "get sad", but I honestly don't know their realistic and viable power political path to "get even" that you are assuming those who "fight" will have.
Making the transition from getting mad/sad to getting even is where everybody who is targeted now is stuck. Because while many of these lawyers and others targeted may be skilled and affluent, few are independently wealthy, or only so many have skills inherently competitive outside the government/nonprofit ecosystem they've been working in. Many of them may have some family wealth to secure them or fund resistance, but people far wealthier than they have bent the knee or seen playing along as the safest way to protect their wealth.
The opposing coalition disrupting their lives alrighty has the loyalties of the violent meatheads and gun-nuts of the country, so forceful methods are out, so that leaves majoritarian coalition politics. The pathway for any of those feeling targeted now to 'get even' would necessarily involve getting a whole lot better at coalition widening and coalition building than they have even been before, otherwise they would not have not have been so vulnerable to having their preferred candidates lose and to having their livelihoods targeted in the first place with overall national approval or indifference.