Angst in the Time of the Restoration

On the dramatic self-indulgence of today's self-nominated martyrs

And please, please, please—save our taxpayer-funded jobs!

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Provided that you know you’ll never have to face the noose, the guillotine, or the firing squad, martyrdom has its attractions.

In these early days of the Trump restoration, there’s no shortage of self-nominated martyrs in the ranks of the Resistance. Supposedly faced with “regime change” and creeping authoritarianism, they invite us to commiserate with them as the gravy train on which they’ve long relied jumps the rails. Life as they’ve known it is coming to an end, and they want us to feel their pain.

But for most Americans, that’s a challenging task. The typical Resistance martyr is not likely to be some downtrodden working stiff or oppressed BIPOC. On the contrary, these postmodern martyrs are often highly privileged people with university degrees, comfortably ensconced in faculty lounges or bureaucratic offices, whose most marked characteristic is an inflated sense of entitlement. In one way and another, they’re subsidized by government—and this, they assume, is no less than their due.

But the Trump Administration poses a threat to this cozy status quo. Suddenly, grants to the total of $400 million, earmarked for Columbia University, were suspended. Suddenly, the federal government’s elephantine bureaucracy came under scrutiny. In the former case, Columbia’s disgraceful toleration of campus antisemitism caught up with it. Clean up your act, said the Trump Administration. Clean it up, or the gravy train will pass you by. In the latter case, the denizens of the administrative state melted down when their activities came under scrutiny. How dare this Elon Musk guy rummage around in our agency, uncovering all kinds of questionable shenanigans?

In short, the mechanism of martyrdom is accountability.

The Columbia faculty, many of whose members have been active participants in the persecution of Jews on campus, pitched a fit over this demand for accountability—as well it might, with so much of its federal grant money in suspended animation. And of course, the Resistance rallied to the defense of the university, portraying it, absurdly, as a victim of the Ogre Trump’s assault on freedom of speech. That’s a tough sell given the Nazi-like character of the speech and behavior at issue, which specifically targets and endangers Jews on the Columbia campus.

On the government front, once Musk’s DOGE operation got cranking, with USAID as its first and shrewdly chosen target, the extent to which federal bureaucracies, operating with little or no oversight, waste taxpayer dollars became painfully apparent. The squeals of rage that greeted the dismantling of USAID was merely an attempt to distract attention from that agency’s absurd Woke obsessions and questionable expenditures, which are replicated throughout the bureaucracy.

Columbia, indeed, promptly capitulated to the Trump Administration’s demands: In the end, money talks. Now that antisemitism costs in the range of $400 million, the university is reconsidering its options—much to the consternation of numerous other entities that claim to be victims of the Trump Oligarchy. That term, oligarchy, is one of three around which those self-nominated victims construct their alternate reality. The other two are regime change and foreign occupation.

In progressive circles, the purpose of political speech is not so much to impart information or a point of view, but to establish a mood—in this case, a mood of foreboding and dread. Thus it is with the unholy trinity described above: terms whose meanings are far from obvious yet charged with negative emotions.

Take oligarchy. Its definition in the Cambridge Dictionary is straightforward enough: a small group of very powerful people that controls a government or society. But the claim that the Trump Administration constitutes an oligarchy is patent nonsense. In America, no such group exists. And given the size and complexity of American society and the American economy, no such group could possibly seize and hold such power.

Then there’s regime change. This term is repeatedly applied to the Trump restoration, suggesting that something sinister and underhanded is taking place. That too is patent nonsense. At the level of American presidential politics, regime change takes place quite frequently. Some examples are the elections of Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK/LBJ, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama. What the Resistance brands as something scary is nothing more than a sharp break with the preceding administration, well within the rules of the game.

That leaves us with foreign occupation, which term has been appropriated by Anne Applebaum for purposes of reviling the Ogre Trump. In an article for The Atlantic titled "There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing: How regime change happens in America." she wrote as follows:

The only thing these policies [DOGE audits] will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation. [Emphasis added.]

Now, I have no quarrel with her first sentence. Clearly, the Trump Administration does intend to “alter the behavior and values of the civil service.” It’s not as though those behaviors and values are above reproach, after all! But Applebaum loses me when she goes on to lament that federal government workers are now experiencing the travails of life under foreign occupation.

This is revealing of her attitude toward Americans who don’t share her general worldview: They’re foreigners, strangers, the shadowy and frightening Other. It also reveals what people like Applebaum, of supposedly enlightened views, have become: defenders of the existing order of things, of the Old Regime. Like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

In an email to Applebaum, one of the victims of this Trump-inspired foreign occupation recounted her own travails. Her cri de coer is worth quoting in full:

I felt compelled to reach out because I cannot get this text out of my mind:

[Applebaum’s foreign occupation trope, quoted above]

I live this every day.

I write as both an employee in the federal government and at a large university that receives substantial federal funding. Over the course of my decades long career, I have risen in the ranks of both. I have close colleagues and former classmates in similar roles in both the public and private sectors.

Like many, we have received instruction not only to remove all pronouns and DEI terminology from our email signatures and websites, but also to not post about or "like" anything on social media related to our work, politics, or policy.

Yet part of my job is to share my work, and I believe in what I do.

With recent and pending announcements, I've witnessed mass layoffs and furloughs. I assume everyone I know professionally will lose their job. I'm a year and half shy of becoming eligible from early retirement based on age and years of service in the government, yet I now assume I will not make it that long, despite always planning to remain a federal employee until full retirement age.

Based on where I live and the types of work I do, I have multiple targets on my back, which I feel acutely and constantly. For this reason, I share only the most generic details here.

Given my training and my current positions, I’m drawn to your work on autocracy. Your piece has touched me deeply because I'm concerned that I will soon face a choice about whether to allow myself to get fired, to resign, or to be considered complicit in the current regime.

I did not respond to the fork in the road emails, nor have I filled out five bullet points weekly on what tasks I have completed. I could not live with anything I would say. I believe that whether or not I will retain my position will not depend on responding. I guess we’ll find out.

But it is stunning how in a matter of weeks, I have watched as members in leadership at my institutions and similar ones comply. My colleagues obey and respond out of fear.

I too worry about my mortgage and paying for college tuition and what happens when the market is flooded with out of work people with advanced degrees and the stock market plummets. Yet here I too hide my identity as I criticize others, for which I carry a sense of deep shame. I behave this way at least in part because I'm the primary earner in my household and I don’t want to put my family or colleagues at greater risk.

Sometimes I feel like I'm shouting amongst close friends and extended family who clearly think that what I say is hyperbole. That what's happening won't really affect "us." That the courts will save us. That it cannot possibly be as bad as we see on the news. That reading books like yours on autocracy or "How Democracies Die" or "On Tyranny" makes me sound depressing, paranoid, fringe, nihilistic. That we "just have to make it” to the next election, as if there will be free and fair elections again in our lifetimes. As if each day doesn't feel like a lifetime.

My teenage child asked me again this year if I cried after the election like I did in 2016. Of course I did. We all saw this coming with Project 2025. They wrote a playbook and are now executing it.

As a child, I learned about other children in oppressive regimes around the world. I remember feeling so sad for those the same age as me. Now our children in the US will grow up under this nightmare as the world watches with horror, disgust, and pity.

I don't want to feel traumatized in my job every day. Like I'm living in foreign occupation. Perhaps it will feel that way until my positions no longer exist. Perhaps only then I will allow myself to use my experiences and skills to speak openly.

Will protests help? Calling my representatives? Boycotting Tesla, Amazon, and Target? I don't know.

I appreciate the opportunity to share some of this with you and importantly, to thank you profoundly for making me and others like me feel seen and heard.

We may be canaries in a coal mine, but no one in the US, and possibly worldwide will escape this period unaffected. Some just don't realize it yet. Others of us do.

This, mind you, is not the lament of some oppressed prole but the complaint of a highly educated and privileged person whose employment is dependent on federal funding and whom, I think it fair to say, has come to view his/her position in life as an ironclad entitlement, not to be interfered with by the elected representatives of the people. And that inflated sense of entitlement leads naturally to inflated claims of persecution under “foreign occupation.”

But most Americans have no expectations of the security this person claims as a right. They know, for example, that their employment is contingent on the viability of the business or organization for which they work, and upon their own performance. They understand that their employer has the right to establish certain rules and standards for the workplace. In the course of their working lives, many of them have been laid off or fired, and have experienced periods of unemployment. Those Americans are unlikely to receive with sympathetic understanding complaints like those quoted above —to put it no more pointedly. They’re more likely to conclude that federal government employees who cannot stomach being “considered complicit in the current regime” should seek employment elsewhere.

I have no doubt that these are stressful times for many employees of our federal administrative state. Nor do I doubt that the DOGE program has been erratic and messy. But really, the dramatic self-indulgence of this person’s complaint is way over the top. One would think that he/she is living through a Stalinist purge, with a bullet in the back of the head or a trip to the gulag in prospect. Oligarchy! Regime change! Foreign occupation! Anne Applebaum, who knows plenty about Stalinism, surely knows better than that.

And whatever happens, I think we can assume that her correspondent will weather the present storm quite comfortably.