The Fantasy of the Parasite Class

 

There’s a fantasy out there. And it’s being used to justify a flood of actions that are stupid, counterproductive, meanspirited—oh, and often illegal.

Actions like firing FBI agents, prosecutors, and inspectors general who protect Americans. “Throwing into the woodchipper” entire federal agencies doing vital work—like USAID (which saves the lives of starving children and those suffering from dangerous diseases in other countries), or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which saves Americans from being ripped off by credit card companies and banks). Shutting down a wide range of grants to charities that help people in need or assess the impacts of discrimination. Slashing the funding of research—and through that action, yanking back hundreds of millions of dollars from universities and hospitals that rely on that funding. Firing people from across all federal agencies randomly, based on their not having served the full two years or one year of probationary status, with no notice and no care about the importance of the jobs those people performed as public servants.

Don’t worry, it’s fine! At least, so says the fantasy. What is that fantasy?

Well you might ask Elon Musk—the world’s richest man, whose company Tesla has paid $0 in taxes to the US government in the past 5 years. Surprise! He hates the IRS. Musk bought Twitter and turned it into his own personal megaphone, a font of disinformation, and a frolicking-space for bigots—and he wants to make it into his own PayPal company as well. Surprise! He hates regulators like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Musk’s megacompany SpaceX is regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Surprise! He hates them and has loudly accused both of intolerable overreach in forcing the company to comply with laws that protect the public.

Elon Musk isn’t satisfied with having more wealth than any one person could ever deserve. He wants to be above all laws and limits. And with the donation of a couple of hundred million dollars to the Trump campaign—less than 1% of what he spent to buy Twitter—he is operating as if he has purchased the entire executive branch of the federal government--and without oversight, as gleefully empowered to take an axe to it.

So far, Musk is doing this with the permission and approval of Trump. Trump hates dealing with details, likes feeling he has the powerful doing his bidding, and is a bully who loves hearing people cry when his thugs punch them for him, so he’s cool with it for now, so long as Musk keeps kneeling and kissing his ring.

The thing is, Trump’s MAGA movement is a populist one. And as populist movements go, it’s in a precarious situation. Only a third of Americans voted for Trump. A touch under a third voted for Harris, and somewhat over a third just didn’t vote. Oh—and that third that voted for Trump? Not all MAGA loyalists! A swath of them were just low-information voters who saw all the campaign signs reading “TRUMP LOW PRICES. KAMALA HIGH PRICES” and shrugged and voted for Trump. That means it is vital to the Trump administration that its actions have to stay popular, because unpopular populist politicians do not fare well.

Now, the destruction of the agencies that protect our food safety and our health, preserve our national parks and clean air and water, and make sure we get our tax refunds and social security payments and veteran's benefits--that is something that will harm most people. If you understand this, you are outraged about their being fed into a woodchipper. Today, there are a lot of people who have been hit full in the face with the cuts and orders of erasure, from academics and agency staffers to folks who are trans, nonbinary, and/or intersex. We are outraged.

But the majority of people in the US thus far either haven’t been directly hit yet, or have been, but don’t realize it. And thus far, they have been placated by the fantasy. It’s the one shown in the illustration at the top of this post: the idea that most government employees are people you love to hate: they are officious bureaucrats high on the feeling of having some small kind of power over you and their ability to make you wait in a long line. They are also lazy, rumored to take all their vacation days and weekends off (gasp!) while you have to hustle and work painful hours. They are annoying snobs with fancy degrees who think they know better than your common sense--and they are overpaid! But simultaneously, they are unqualified—a vast sea of “DEI hires” given plum jobs over more qualified cis straight white men because they tick some “diversity” box. They are the worst kind of people—ones you are pleased to see suffer. Them losing their jobs is no loss to the country, says the fantasy—on the contrary, it’s great for the nation!

You hear that framing all over. The rightwing news media use it constantly—not a surprise. But mainstream media do it too, in all their opinion columns and election analyses that claim that Democrats have lost touch with “average American voters” and become some problematic partnership of strident, entitled marginalized groups and the egghead intellectual elite. And you see it starkly on rightwing social media—check out this post from Musk himself:

This is obviously a rich claim coming from an obscenely rich man, whose companies get many millions of dollars in subsidies from the US government. Did you know that if you went back to the time of the Neanderthals, and saved $10,000 under a rock every day for 80,000 years, you would still have less than half of what Musk has today? If anyone is a parasite on society, it’s Musk.

But this claim that civil servants and university researchers and employees of charities are “the Parasite Class” becomes a lot more disturbing when you understand its historical context. It parallels the claim that the Nazis made about Jews—that they were permanent foreigners, leeching bankers and pawnbrokers who refused to engage in honest manual labor, and were thus “unproductive parasites.” As parasites, Jews poisoned the blood of the nation and had to be purged and exterminated. 

That certainly aligns with Trump’s infamous campaign claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It also resonates with a phrase Musk is always using to describe his supposed nemesis: “the woke mind virus.”

This sort of talk is meant to dehumanize those it attacks. You are not firing or deporting human beings—you are getting rid of parasites! This is not aggression—it is self-defense, hygiene, a cleanse of poisonous toxins. Musk cut off all ties with his trans daughter, saying she had been destroyed by the “woke mind virus” pathogen. Those of us who do not agree with MAGA thinking are like undead zombies with minds under the control of something monstrous. To cast us out is necessary. Nobody wants to be the parent who must destroy a zombie who had been their child, but the child you loved is already dead, so stiffen up and do what you must!

The tactic here is to try to get the majority of Americans to not just tolerate the destruction of a protective system of agencies that took decades to build, but to be enthusiastic about it. Make it sound like a horror movie and hand out popcorn! The progressives and the public servants are Parasite Class pod people—watch as we set them afire! Or frame it as some kind of TV cop show. Musk is claiming to have found hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and “kickbacks” everywhere he looks in Treasury databases (though he has provided zero evidence of this). Blame DEI for this supposed massive swindle. Then use the giant megaphone you bought and renamed X to tell Americans that 90% of them are loving this show—it has the best ratings!

Distract distract distract while you remake the US government into your personal piggy bank and enabling apparatus.

Is this working? Well, if you watch Fox News—and more Americans watch it than any other news source—absolutely! You hear almost nothing negative about the slashing and burning, and lots and lots of talk about how Americans’ tax dollars are being saved and the populace is rejoicing. There is a lot of celebration at the comeuppance of supposed nasty elitist bureaucrats and nefarious agents who persecuted Trump, stole the 2020 election, caused the January 6^th insurrection, forced vaccines, hired the unqualified, convinced deluded children to get themselves mutilated, and made you drink out of nasty paper straws. The fact that people being fired are shown shocked or in tears is great! Those, we are told, are very delicious tears to drink.

The question is how long this mythos can be sustained. Fox News certainly isn’t sharing the current burgeoning of poignant posts by devoted civil servants who have suddenly found themselves fired. And our social media networks are so highly polarized now that those posts probably don’t often escape left-leaning circles. But there are a lot of them out there, like this one:

The thing is, while our social media may be polarization machines, and the rightwing mediasphere hermetically sealed, all of us benefit from federal agency work, most of us receive federal support of a myriad of types, and you will find federal employees, researchers, charity workers, and university employees spread across the entirety of the US. Think of all the people who know or have been touched by the work of a national park ranger. Think of the communities in every state that rely on a local university that in turn relies on federal grant funding. Consider all the agencies whose labor we rely on. We expect so many things to be safely tested and monitored: the food we buy, the planes we fly, the prescriptions we take. We expect government employees to protect our power supply from ransomware attacks, warn us of dangerous weather events, show up to help us if an earthquake strikes. We expect government watchdogs to keep vigilant and protect us from banks engaging in risky financial shenanigans with our money.

It is hardly only those residing in “blue” states that care about these things. This week there was Congressional consternation across the party lines when Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration. Those nuclear safety workers oversee the US nuclear stockpile, as well as tracking nuclear risks worldwide. Initially, administration appointees to the Energy Department claimed that only 50 people were fired, and they "merely" held  “administrative and clerical” jobs, but that turned out to be untrue. After an outcry informed the Energy Department Trump appointees that the people they had fired actually did vital work, the appointees began trying to rehire some or all of people they had fired—but found they had shot themselves in the foot by immediately cutting off their email accounts at the same time they surprised the employees with sudden notices that they were fired. Now many could not be contacted to be given a rehire offer.

In sum, right now an axe is being taken to all the federal agencies, in order to purge people deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump, or to satisfy the whims of Musk, or in an effort to just randomly trim 10% of all federal employees. Meanwhile, charities and universities and farms and schools and all sorts of entities that are supported with federal funds are having the rug pulled out from under them.  Most Americans either have yet to notice, or have been told this is a glorious purge of a parasite class. The question is, as more people find their butts bitten by this destruction of the institutions that make their lives and businesses possible, how long can the fantasy be sustained that what is taking place is a cleanse of toxins that they should celebrate?

Time will tell.