The Information Regime of Authoritarianism, coming soon to a Federal Agency Near You
If the Project 2025 folks get their way, we will all soon live in the sort of dystopian, disorienting information ecosystem the MAGA many already inhabit
This post is inspired by this very insightful thread that Dave Roberts posted on ex-Twitter. It opened with a link to an article that used a wide array of government data to establish convincingly that yes, crime rates are indeed very much down recently. Democracies depend on access to reliable information that citizens can use as the basis for our arguments about what problems we face and how we might solve them. To a great extent, Trump 2.0 (as articulated by the folks at Project 2025) is all about dismantling that sort of democratic knowledge/information regime and replacing it with a dystopian and authoritarian version of it in which knowing things about empirical reality with any degree of certainty will be much harder, if not impossible.
Remember how Trump floated the idea that Covid would go away if we just stopped testing for it? People treated that like it was Trump being dumb, but he was actually articulating a quite savvy, authoritarian way of handling information. Want climate change to go away? Just stop measuring it! If you think I’m kidding, that is precisely what the Project 2025 folks have planned for NOAA.
Want proof that Trump's brilliant second term policies will have reduced the federal deficit despite the fact that he lowered taxes, deported 3% of the workforce, and jacked up spending to pay for his deportation force? Just look at what the very fine people Trump appointed to staff the Treasury & CBO have said! And as we learned last night in the debate, every legal scholar and everyone in America wanted Roe overturned and the laws about abortion returned to the states! In a few years that will be the official line at Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services and amongst the majority of SCOTUS clerks, just as Trump’s Department of Justice will focus its attention on exonerating the J6 “political prisoners” and prosecuting the vicious enemies of the people who singled out these great Patriots for persecution.
Frightening scenarios like this demonstrate how electing Trump in 2024 is a very different proposition than in 2016. Far right ideologues have latched on to Trump as the vehicle for their revolutionary project of “dismantling” the parts of the “administrative state” they don’t like and weaponizing the parts they find useful. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation and former Trump loyalists like Johnny McEntee have already begun collecting thousands of resumes of the sorts of monkey-wrench wielding saboteurs they can immediately insert into the federal bureaucracy to render it less capable of producing empirical information, and more adept at producing “data” that’s custom-made for the MAGA messaging du jour.
Many wanted Trump to do this to the federal government in his first term, but his incompetence and unseriousness got in the way. Consider this story from Michael Lewis's Fifth Risk. In February 2016 Chris Christie told Trump he needed to appoint a transition team. Trump says "no thanks, don't need one." Christie says "but it's legally required" because we need to have 500+ names ready to nominate for positions if you win. Trump says "fine, but I'm not going to pay for it." Christie says, "you can use campaign funds." Trump: "Nope, raise your own money. But not too much!" In July 2016 Trump is the official nominee and the 100+ person transition team gets to work in earnest. Trump, however, has no idea this operation was up and running. He finds out by reading about it in a newspaper and immediately calls Christie in for a scolding. Steve Bannon walks into the meeting to find Trump yelling at Christie: "You're stealing my money! You're stealing my f*cking money! What the f*ck is this?!?!" Bannon explains it's legally required. Trump: "F*ck the law. I don't give a f*ck about the law. I want my f*cking money." Trump tells Bannon and Christie to shut down the legally-mandated transition...Bannon talks him off the ledge, but over the next few months Trump would occasionally berate Christie for the money he was "wasting" (Trump's money, my money!) on the transition process. There was no need for such a thing, Trump thought. "Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves." He thought he could identify and vet 500+ people in 2 hours with the help of one person.
Trump walked into the White House in 2017 with little idea of what to do, and with a rag tag team of people, many of whom still had some semblance of loyalty to "the system" rather than just "what Trump wants." Project 2025 is all about hitting the ground running.
"Liberal proceduralism" has become a punching bag for a range of folks lately...and bureaucratic processes are indeed often quite boring, imperfect, and weaponized in shitty ways. And also, when they are destroyed, they'll be replaced by a far more sinister and authoritarian-friendly knowledge regime.
We already live in a media environment in which 49% of Americans think unemployment is at a 50-year high and more than half believe the economy is shrinking and that we're in a recession. Now imagine a world in which there's no reliable data to contest that.
The next Trump Administration will use Schedule F to staff as much of the government as possible with people who will produce "information" designed to "prove" whatever it is the Trump Administration wants to be "true." Finding out what's really happening will be much harder, if not impossible. Put another way, we will all be living in the same disorienting information space that the MAGA many already live in. Was the 2020 election stolen? Who are you going to believe, the mountains of proof about bamboo ballots and 2000 Mules that Mike Lindell and co. have compiled, or what a bunch of egghead deep state "election officials" say?
When we have a government run by Mike Lindell types, we'll have a government capable of producing whatever "information" it needs to fit with its end goals...and the process of governance will have become completely disconnected from reality. That's the information regime of authoritarianism.
You know that line about how at least Mussolini made the trains run on time? Weirdly enough, that meme has made its way into our public discourse in such a way that many think it’s actually true. “The guy was a blustering, buffoonish tyrant, but at least his dictatorial ways got some good shit done.” But it didn’t work that way at all. Mussolini made the trains run on time in the same way that the next Trump administration will solve climate change…by taking credit for what previous leaders had done and then having the government and the media say that everything was going great even though it wasn’t. That’s the information regime of fascism.
The seriousness of the trouble we are in has been magnified significantly this week. the firehose of bullshit out of atlanta yesterday evening, the blatant corruption in the jurisprudence of scotus, which was mammoth this week (legalizing bribery, making homelessness a crime, monkeywrenching the administration of federal regulations, etc., etc.) are vile contributing evidence of how rapidly the nation is deteriorating into an authoritarian state along the line of Hannah Arendt's treatise on totalitarianism. These varieties of "authoritarian information systems" are right there in that book. Today we are just beginning to see how the public will react, between now and November. I feel like we are on "life support" politically. same is true around the world, and in the midst of heading toward a critical ecological situation, speaking of "life support." i am currently quite disgruntled with the human species.