Revolution Town
Faceless vandals take a beleaguered city.
IN THE CAPITAL CITY: Hale young men in fleece vests escort smiling women in fur hats. Technologists with California accents sit in cafes huddling over laptops. Bullet-headed men in tan suits puff out their chests to show their White House badges. The permanent class of office workers stride quickly through the rainy streets with their faces pointed to the ground. Everyone is on one side of the line or the other. Some want to hide it and some want to flaunt it. The last time I was here, for inauguration, the streets were flooded with red-hatted faithfuls drunk on Jim Beam and victory. Now, the streets are empty. But only because the rats have moved inside. They’re in the agencies, chewing up the wires. No one seems to be able to get rid of them.
Of all of the federal government’s departments, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is perhaps the most straightforwardly helpful to the public. It tries, within the confines of bureaucracy, to stop people from getting ripped off. It does not leaven its work with plots to destabilize foreign governments or spy on subversives. It is Consumer Reports with enforcement powers, providing a modest firewall against the constant deluge of banks and tech companies that make it their business to refine the practice of confusing people and deluging them with misleading verbiage and picking their pockets. If the CFPB was the size of the CIA, all Americans would be better off.
So naturally it is being dismantled, as a favor to the very sort of people who were the subjects of its enforcement. Russell Vought, Trump’s unblinking bureaucratic hatchet-wielder, who has spent a lifetime of dark nights pleasuring himself to the idea of a government that does nothing for anyone, has ordered the CFPB to cease all activity. Elon Musk, after a single day’s work of his destructa-kids, on Friday tweeted “CFPB RIP,” the act of a Wild West conman selling fraudulent patent medicines and thumbing his nose at the sheriff he just shot, before riding on to the next town.
On a cold Saturday morning, dozens of members of the CFPB’s staff union gathered in front of the agency’s boxy, modern headquarters on 17th Street in downtown DC, a block from the White House. The protest of their own disemboweling displayed the earnest nature of the CFPB’s employees. “Five, six, seven, eight, Dodd-Frank is pretty great!” they chanted. At one point they all held aloft plastic sporks and intoned, with great solemnity, that “Neither rain, nor snow, nor forks in the road” would stop them from protecting the public.
Every one of the employees that I approached to talk about why they were there told me that I needed to speak to their union’s designated press contact. That person, in a neon vest, told me that she was not in fact the official communications person, so she was only authorized to recite an official, mutually agreed-upon statement about why the CFPB was good, which was printed on a single folded-up piece of paper that she extracted from her jacket pocket and read to me as traffic whizzed by. Though this is not, overall, a good press strategy for a union rally, it did drive home the sobriety of this group of government workers. These are people who will stand in the rain and make up rhymes about Dodd-Frank and tightly adhere to a communications policy even if there is only one reporter in attendance. These people are nerds for the public good, damn it. Contrast their behavior with that of a billionaire who does a bunch of ketamine and then turns a horde of 19 year-olds loose on the internal databases. It is not hard to see which side here takes the public interest more seriously.
A friend of mine who has been editing some of the very best coverage of DOGE’s breathtaking vandalism of the federal government says that all of this “amounts to a historical event on par with the Russian Revolution.” If so, it is a disappointing revolution from the perspective of the resistance. This revolution is taking place inside of computer servers inside of locked rooms inside of locked buildings. It presents no face to the outside world. Despite all of the sporadic rallies and protests of the past week, the streets of DC lack activity, and the people of DC seem chastened, shell shocked, unable to find a base from which to launch a counterattack. This is a revolution by the rich against the poor carried out wholly by bureaucratic intermediaries on each side. The billionaires’ chosen bureaucrats are wiping out the bureaucrats whose job it is to maintain the beleaguered social safety net for the poor. The screws are being loosened on America’s wheels. It may take some time before the wheels fall off, but when they do, remember that the vandalism happened here and now.
This nation has never been able to carry on with forward progress for any real sustained period of time. It’s all action and reaction, cycles of openness and then an angry slamming of the open door. You can wander through the Smithsonian Museum of American History looking for hints of where it all started, for the historical analogs for this point in our oscillating cycle of glory and blood. We brought the slaves and built the land of freedom; we killed the natives and planted the tree of liberty; we won the war of liberation and fell in love with Jim Crow. On and on and on. It’s a mistake to ever get too comfortable with where America is going. There is always someone somewhere plotting to drag us back into the past. “How did we become Us?” asks the museum’s centerpiece exhibit of social movements. Turns out we haven’t, quite yet. In that exhibit is a black and white news photo of columns of KKK members, holding hands, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, with the US Capitol behind them. I peered down at the date: 1925. A perfect century ago. The cycle is turning right on time.
On Friday afternoon, as news of the CFPB’s targeting was first circulating, a smaller group of protesters had spontaneously assembled in front of the building—fewer than a dozen, alarmed citizens in search of some kind of action, somehow. One of those people was Catherine, a woman in an oversized black hoodie who had taken a 36-hour bus ride from Alabama several days before to get to DC. She was a fervent Christian who was shocked into action when she heard the Episcopal Bishop who had begged Trump to have mercy on immigrants being accused of “the sin of empathy.”
“I’m called by God to say something about this,” she told me. She was sleeping in a cheap motel and going to any protest she could find. She’d been homeless before, so this didn’t feel like a great hardship. She was holding a hand-drawn poster that read “HONK FOR DEMOCRACY,” but getting little traction with passing drivers.
“I’m fed up with the way they’re trying to portray Jesus. The greatest commandment is to love each other,” she said. Growing up in a conservative religious town in the deep South had not made her hateful or close-minded. Instead, it had alerted her to the dangers of hateful close-mindedness. Her understanding of what Jesus meant had compelled her to drop everything and come here, to her nation’s capital, to declare out loud that this—all of this—is not what Jesus wanted. When I asked her for her opinion of DC, she considered for a long moment and replied, “I think it’s full of evil.”
That much, everyone agrees on. But she was, herself, the seed of the the cycle’s turning. We will all be buried deep in shit. And then the seeds will grow.
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Related reading: Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!; You Are Invited to the Predator’s Ball, As Food; Companies Stronger Than Governments.
Go march in the streets this week. Now’s not the time to sit around and wonder what you can do. Now is the time to get more hardcore, everywhere. If Catherine can do it so can you.
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For the friend comparing this to the Russian Revolution, I feel like a more apt comparison is the fall of the USSR. Just like then, everything's being chopped up for parts and divvied up amongst a few oligarchs, undoing the work of millions over the past 70+ years.
If we had a real labor movement in this country, it would be calling for mass demonstrations in DC, demanding that Musk and his minions get the hell out, and that they be prosecuted for breaking and entering and theft of government property.