So the coup has happened.

The modern administrative state built under Franklin Roosevelt is finally being dismantled. It was a long time coming. The “Reagan revolution” was a big step. Bill Clinton collaborated. And so it went. Biden could be said to have tried weakly to stop the train, but too late.

But what is the meaning of this “DOGE revolution?” What forces is it responding to, and why now?

Beyond Donald Trump and Elon Musk lies something bigger. These historic actors appear on the stage of a crumbling empire, just as the mad emperors Nero and Caligula in Rome. They are swept in as manifestations of historic forces greater than they are; in this case, the empire is crumbling as the industrial civilization built on fossil fuels declines. It has already run off a cliff but is terrified to look down below, where the ruins of other civilizations lie: the Roman Empire, but also the Assyrian, Maya, Ottoman and so on.

What brought us Trump? MAGA — a backward look, as modernity, late capitalism, is no longer able to provide a rising standard of living for the majority of its people –– draws on nostalgia, a longing for a supposed idyllic time. It comes wrapped in misogyny, racism, hate and fear responding to a capitalist system that failed in its promises.

The energy crisis of the 1970s as well as the debt for the failed war on Vietnam, caused the first calls for “austerity,” for “cutbacks.” The New York City fiscal crisis of 1975, Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1981 and the ensuing war on organized labor; the decimation of the Rust Belt, as industries moved first to the South, then overseas, to save their rates of profit — MAGA is a response to the slowly declining standard of living of the working class, one which as a truck driver I have lived and witnessed.

To be clear: While the Green New Deal offers a more hopeful vision than MAGA’s yearning for 1950s iron rule by straight white men, it trafficks in nostalgia too. Oh for the days of FDR, big government projects, and the ultimate government works program: WWII. Ah, if we could only be on a war footing, but this time a technological war against global heating!

Equally unrealistic. Faced with the fear of an uncertain future, right and left want to run back to a supposed golden age.

But you can never go back. There is no longer the capital accumulation there was back then, relative to the costs of investing in highly automated production. Look around and you will see all the big capital investment projects around the world: harbors, railroads, airports — they are all Chinese capital now. The United States used to do that in its heyday, the 1950s and ’60s. No more. The capital is just not there. And the Chinese economy is also slowing down now.

Capitalism is in crisis around the world, whether in its free-market form in the United States and Europe or its state-capitalist form in China.

We have reached a point in industrial civilization where we can see the writing on the wall we are on course to hit. Thus, the malaise of nostalgia. Resource depletion is real, whether it is rare earths for batteries and electronics, sand for concrete, fertile soil, or oil and gas (fracking opened up new supplies, but they are not infinite). And we are drowning in our waste: CO2 is heating the earth, causing great destructive storms and fires; plastics are choking our oceans; forever chemicals are everywhere in the water.

And still, we only know how to keep digging and burning and razing more rainforest for more cattle for more burgers — and on it goes.

Yet we know deep down now that this cannot go on forever.

But how to stop the machine? When GDP stops growing even a percentage point, workers are thrown into misery.

Never mind the madmen Trump and Musk. All the cuts in human services — in meeting human needs — will not solve the crisis. They will steal from the workers, from the poorest, the capital to fund Musk’s schemes to populate Mars (and enrich himself and his cronies along the way). But that too is temporary. All the capital in our Social Security trust fund will not be enough to keep the wheels of capitalism turning indefinitely. Never mind the politicians, U.N. heads, economists and engineers. They are as lost as we are.

A sign of how deep their crisis is: In the old days of oligarchs, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, Rockefeller and so on made huge fortunes building things: railroads, coal mines, steel, ships. Look at today. Modern capitalism is about finance and social control — moving money around to make money, ponzi schemes, bitcoin schemes, hedge funds, selling us lies. Making money from nothing, and creating nothing. A casino.

One can study history and see that civilizations rise and decline, usually on a bell curve. Neither the Romans nor the Maya disappeared overnight. There are often periods of gradual decline, as we have experienced from the 1970s oil shock to today. There can be moments of dramatic change — maybe what will happen with the DOGE coup, if it succeeds. We, the working people, will be thrown back to a lifestyle more like the 1920s: work till you die; no social insurance; repression of unions; general misery. Our grandchildren could never know health care; clean drinking water a privilege not a right; etc. Their grandchildren might be the ones with an even starker physical reality as the climate disasters will have wreaked so much destruction that they might become unable to rebuild after each hit. Remember: it is Mother Earth who will be the determinant, and whether we decide to help or to obstinately continue our destruction will matter.

It is only fossil fuels, beginning with coal, that made this industrial civilization possible at all, not “ingenuity.” There is no replacement for the vast amounts of easy-to-get energy concentrated in fossil fuels, and it is no service to anyone to pretend “green technology” can solve that. Solar and wind can help us humans live a comfortable lifestyle at a lower energy level than we are used to. But humans do not need unlimited industrial amounts of electricity. Capitalism does. Heavy industry needs much more than humans. Fossil fuels were a gift of hundreds of millions of years of compressed solar energy that capitalism squandered recklessly, creating vast fortunes over several centuries.

That epoch is dying. That is what underlines Musk, Trump and DOGE. That is what we must wrap our heads around, even as we oppose these oligarchs: Yes, we fight them, but they are but the symptom of a much deeper predicament.

Community, sharing, mutual aid, gratitude for nature’s gifts, learning from our Indigenous brethren, humility, respecting all life as reciprocal beings (not as “resources”), living a gift economy, and taking care of each other. This is what we have to carry us through what will be a great transition — that we can make worse or better through our actions, but that we cannot avoid.

We have no choice. The old is dying; Musk and Trump are but a manifestation of that. The new is not yet born, but its seeds are already in our small towns, our city neighborhoods, everywhere we form associations for mutual aid and everywhere we take care of each other. We know what to do. No one else will save us. And we are in it for the long, long haul.

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