As Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in a secondary role, steamroll through the federal government, there’s a taxonomy to the players that is important to understand. It’s semi-hidden at the moment. But you can see it showing up if you look up close and it will likely become more visible over time.

There are three big factions operating in Trump’s government with currently overlapping but very distinct aims and strategies. First, you have MAGA, which wants to punish and displace the people who made life hard for Trump in his first term and replace them with loyalists. That’s mostly about power and personal fealty to Trump. Ideology is mostly secondary to the core aim. Second, you have Christian nationalists who want to seize the power of the state to execute a top down re-traditionalization of American society and culture. Russell Vought is key to this group. The basic theory goes back into the aughts, when a faction of conservatives decided (essentially a counsel of despair) that they had lost control of American culture and that state power was required to get it back. Third are people like Elon Musk who want to radically hollow out the government, outsource its functions and replace many of those functions with novel technologies — AI, cryptocurrency, etc. This is a mix of Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” business culture combined with “dark enlightenment” Yarvinian degenerate thought.

Made a point over the weekend about “shock and awe” and how one reacts to that when often there doesn’t seem like there’s much you can do. As we see in most of history, the key in many cases is simply holding on. As I tried to convey in that post, “shock and awe” is primarily a psychological operation meant to trigger confusion, paralysis and collapse. But the impact of speed and multiplicity diminishes over time and fairly quickly. So for the literally millions of people on the direct receiving end of what’s happening right now, primarily in the federal workforce, simply holding on is “doing something.” The whole point of this effort is to create lots of faits accompli during that initial phase of disorientation and paralysis. Pretty quickly the impact of that shock and disorientation and paralysis wears off. So simply holding on through that first period is a big thing. The balance of powers and levers available start to shift. And in some cases rapidly. I’m not being pollyannaish about it. The situation still remains grave and with most of the power on one side. But they do become relatively less powerful with each day that passes. Not by much but by some.