Darren Beattie may not be a household name, but you are almost certainly familiar with his long-standing ideas and preoccupations. Beattie, a speechwriter whom Trump fired in 2018 and appointed to a top State Department job this week, is a fixture in far-right conspiracist circles.

Over the years, Beattie has reportedly spoken alongside white nationalists, alleged that the FBI orchestrated January 6—his preferred term is Fedsurrection—and repeatedly posted online that various Black personalities and politicians should “take a KNEE to MAGA.” In his new role as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, he will help shape the tone of America’s public messaging abroad, oversee “the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Global Public Affairs,” and participate “in foreign policy development,” according to the State Department’s website.

Beattie’s ascent is another sign that the new administration has no interest in catering to norms established by its critics or perceived political foes. What was a scandal in Trump’s first term is grounds for a promotion in his second. Beattie’s 2018 firing came after CNN reported that he had spoken at the 2016 H. L. Mencken Club, an event whose attendees have included prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow. Beattie then launched Revolver News, a right-wing website that trumpeted his appointment and described him as “a relentless force in exposing the left’s DEI agenda, their censorship schemes, and the J6 entrapment operation.”

Many of the site’s articles are standard conservative fare: attacks on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats alongside criticism of powerful technology companies that purportedly censor the right, including Revolver itself. Other content on the site veers sharply into conspiracism: It often posts external links to content from the likes of Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonym of the pro-authoritarianism writer Costin Alamariu, who has posited that “Black Africans” are so genetically ”divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries,” and Steve Sailer, another prominent booster of pseudoscientific racism. Beattie has also used Revolver as a platform to advance his nationalist views, including pushing for mass deportation and “America-first trade policy.”

[From the September 2023 issue: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Beattie is a “well-regarded” and “beloved” figure in Trump world, as Semafor and Politico describe him, respectively. (Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson both praised Beattie in text messages to Semafor’s Ben Smith.) His appointment will likely be seen as a win for the nationalist wing of the Republican Party, which has been fighting against tech-right figures including Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sacks for influence in the Trump administration. While the tech-right and nationalists have been aligned in many areas, they vocally diverged on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants in a very public internet fight in December. More recently, as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer reported, Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE, the team he leads within the Trump administration. Bannon, who sits squarely in the populist-nationalist camp and is friends with Beattie, has aggressively criticized Musk and other tech elites and said publicly that he wants to impede their influence.

True adherents to the nationalist-populist wing of MAGA are almost nonexistent in Trump’s Cabinet. For as long as he is in his acting role in the State Department, however, Beattie joins a small but powerful group of nationalist Trump appointees. The immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, who is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and his fellow conservative intellectual Michael Anton, who is also at the State Department, are among this cohort.

The ascendant intellectual wing of the nationalist right will be particularly pleased with Beattie’s appointment. Prior to his time in the Trump administration, Beattie received a Ph.D. in political theory from Duke University, where he wrote his dissertation on the prominent German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and he has contributed to The New Atlantis, a publication with a reputation among the right for its rigorous critiques of technology.

If nothing else, Beattie’s eccentricities—buttoned-up intellectualism on one hand, crude and offensive polemic on the other—demonstrate one underlying truth of Trump world: It’s a big tent. Kiss the ring, and you may just be welcomed back.

In the isolation of a Washington, D.C., office building, with a small team of acolytes, Elon Musk is dismantling the civil service and fulfilling an old dream. Deep within the folds of the Western brain resides a yearning for a savior: a master engineer who imposes reason and efficiency on the messiness of modern life, who can deploy his acumen to usher in a golden age of abundance and harmony. This is a fantasy of submission, where the genius takes charge.

Given American conservatives’ recent rhetoric, their surrender to Musk’s vision of utopia is discordant, to say the least. Ever since the pandemic, the MAGA movement has decried the tyranny of a cabal of self-certain experts, who wield their technical knowledge unaccountably. But even as the right purports to loathe technocracy, it has empowered an engineer to radically remake the American state in the name of efficiency.

Trumpists might be surprised to know that they are fulfilling a dream first conceived by a 19th-century French crank, Henri de Saint-Simon. A utopian polymath who fought in the American Revolution and claimed to be a descendant of Charlemagne, he imagined a society in which engineers and industrial managers usurped the aristocracy at the top of the pecking order. The ruling cadre of engineers, he theorized, wouldn’t just solve social and economic problems, but serve as high priests, guiding society to efficiency, progress, and harmony. Technocracy and spirituality were intertwined in his doctrine, which he called the “New Christianity.”

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

In the last years of his life, Saint-Simon struggled to find a publisher for his books. His despair led him to shoot himself seven times in the head, a failed suicide attempt. Only after his death, in 1825, did he win cultlike devotion; his wider influence became unmistakable. Scholars dubbed him the “father of socialism,” and his veneration of the engineer ricocheted through the history of the left, especially in its faith in centralized planning. “Master technology,” Stalin famously implored his followers. “It is time that the Bolsheviks become experts.” (Eventually, Stalin murdered and imprisoned those who followed this command.)

The worship of the engineer is not confined to any single strain of ideology. It’s a modern impulse, and even ardent critics of the state have fallen victim to it. In Atlas Shrugged, every high-school libertarian’s favorite novel, Ayn Rand’s heroic protagonist, John Galt, is an engineer whose solitary capacity for invention and heterodox thinking make him a sort of über-mensch. And there are hints of this same heroic self-conception in the right-wing swatches of present-day Silicon Valley. Engineers are prophets of a new order because they promise inventions that will usher in the purest expressions of freedom: realms (cryptocurrency, space colonies) that are beyond the reach of the state.

One pivotal figure in American political history briefly embodied the noblest aspirations for technocracy—President Herbert Hoover, nicknamed the Great Engineer. After training at Stanford, he made a fortune in the mining business. Hoover believed ardently in scientific management: Any procedure could be simplified through studying the data. By monitoring workers, the engineer could cull waste from the productive process. Born a Quaker, Hoover delivered lyrical descriptions of his life’s work, which aren’t so far from Saint-Simon’s faith. Where other occupations were “parasitic,” in Hoover’s view, the engineer was the handmaiden of a humane social order because he “elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life.”

[Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy] democracy

At his best, Hoover’s technocratic skills were something to behold. He was a genius at orchestrating responses to catastrophes; his coordination of food and supply shipments in Europe during World War I became the basis for his political mystique. Progressives were so enamored of his work that they desperately hoped he would run for president as a Democrat, so that they could preside over a new era of rational, well-organized government. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a fan before he became a foe, tried and failed to draft Hoover to run as his party’s standard-bearer in 1920.

Elected as a Republican in 1928, Hoover was in the White House when the nation’s economy collapsed. History regards him with disdain, less for his policies than for his distinct lack of warmth and his disregard for human suffering. He treated food distribution as an engineering problem, yet he never managed to describe victims with compassion. According to his biographer Joan Hoff Wilson, “They all became statistics—by the same impersonal scientific engineering approach and temperament that was to shock and dismay his fellow Americans during the Great Depression and erode his political credibility with them.”

The problem with applying scientific management to the government is its hollow heart, as the former auto executive Robert McNamara later showed to horrifying effect. As the secretary of defense, he presided over the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, deploying a data-driven approach that rendered casualties in the vernacular of statistics. (McNamara didn’t train as an engineer, but he self-consciously employed the mindset.) In his enthusiasm for optimization and efficiency, he paid no heed to the terrible human toll of his immaculate systems.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

In a far more benign way, Jimmy Carter, the only other engineer to become president, struggled to form human connections with the public. As the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker put it, he used an “engineer’s approach of devising ‘comprehensive’ programs on this subject or that, but repeatedly failed to mobilize public opinion in their support.” Carter’s brain was ill-equipped to process the irrationality of politics.

Despite this history of failure, Americans haven’t shaken the hope that some benevolent, hyperrational leader, immune to the temptations of political power, will step in to redesign the nation, to solve the problems that politicians can’t. That hope is unbreakable, because American culture invests engineers with the aura of wizardry. This is true for Elon Musk. For years, the media glorified him as a magician who harnessed the power of the sun, who revived the American space program, who rescued the electric car. Given that hagiographic press, some of it deserved, he could easily believe in his own ability to fix the American government—and think that a large chunk of the nation would believe that, too.

But in his short stay in Washington, Musk has already evinced the same moral shortcoming that afflicted Hoover and McNamara, the same inability to calculate the costs of cruelty. He has casually paused global aid programs that alleviate suffering; he has moved to destroy bureaucrats’ careers without concern for the rippling personal consequences. He has done this with an arrogance suffused with the spiritual self-certainity of Saint-Simon’s priestly caste of engineers. To a brain as rational as Musk’s, democracy is waste and inefficiency. The best system is the one bursting forth from his mind.

The institutions of the American government are under siege by the president of the United States. Donald Trump claims that he is fulfilling campaign promises to slash the bureaucracy and reduce waste. But what he is in fact doing is weakening potential obstacles—especially the federal civil service—that might stand in the way of his accumulation of wide and unaccountable power.

No one likes bureaucracies, even if they must acknowledge that modern states cannot function without them. But Trump’s contempt for government employees is not driven by some sort of noble, reformist instinct: He distrusts public service because he does not understand it. The president has a solipsistic and binary view of the world in which everything revolves around him, and other people either support him or oppose him. He is unable to comprehend the principle of an apolitical service that must obey the Constitution and the law over the wishes of Donald J. Trump.

In Trump’s world, service—including military service—is for suckers and losers. Only saps forgo personal benefit and miss out on a chunky payday in order to be part of something bigger than themselves. The president and his MAGA allies, accordingly, have portrayed diligent government employees as schemers who are part of some nefarious ideological project. In a titanic act of projection, Trump has convinced millions of Americans that their fellow citizens are scammers just out for themselves.

I retired from the federal workforce in 2022 with more than 25 years of service in the Defense Department and on the staff of the U.S. Senate. I agree that plenty of agencies and deadwood employees should go gently into that good night, and sooner rather than later. But folding up federal agencies and firing their employees is a complicated business, requiring a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. Only someone with profound hubris would be willing to make such changes in a matter of weeks (especially if they lack any experience in the public sector), which may explain why Trump tapped Elon Musk for the job.

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

Trump’s project began with an executive order empowering DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” This is stilted hooey, but in any case, the unelected, unconfirmed, and unaccountable Musk took up the cause with gusto, barging into government offices, attempting to access classified facilities, and seizing control of information assets such as the Treasury’s payments system.

Some of this is constitutionally sketchy and probably illegal, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday. Some government employees may, of course, one day prevail in civil lawsuits, but with Trump now in control of the Justice Department and immunized for “official acts” by the Supreme Court, no one in his administration is going to stop him or Musk at this point.

Musk’s role in Trump’s efforts creates significant conflicts of interest. (He is a government contractor, after all.) His motives are somewhat opaque but likely come from both practical and ideological interests, especially because these days he sounds like a late-night caller to a MAGA talk-radio program. (The U.S. Agency for International Development, he posted on X, was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”) And if Musk can seize control of the federal payments system—as he seems to be in the process of doing—perhaps he thinks he is a step closer to fulfilling his dream of replacing the national financial system with some galactic payment app that handles everything.

But, like Trump, Musk also appears to just detest people who work in public service. Both men resent government agencies for two important reasons: They do not own these public institutions, and the employees do not instantly obey their orders.

Federal employees answer to their departments and to the president, but within the constraints of the law and the Constitution. Trump’s supporters will argue that the machinery of the federal government should, in fact, answer directly and completely to the president, but they’re trying to revive a settled argument: America already had the debate over cronyism and the spoils system in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is why the United States has laws specifically meant to prevent the abuse of public institutions for personal or political gain, including the Pendleton Act of 1883, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, and various iterations of the Hatch Act.

Indeed, even this administration seems to realize that what it’s asking is completely alien to the modern American credo of professional and apolitical national service. Trump has resurrected an order he issued back in 2020 (which was immediately rescinded by Joe Biden) with some careful edits. But the new language about “accountability” does not change the fact that Trump’s order reclassifies many civil servants as functionally equivalent to political appointees, removing their civil-service protections and making them fireable at will by the president. In other words, Trump is redefining public servants as presidential servants.

Trump learned the hard way during his first term that bureaucrats and other federal employees, with their pesky insistence on outdated concepts such as “the rule of law,” could be a consistent obstacle to his various machinations. When Trump tried to strong-arm the Ukrainians into investigating Biden by withholding U.S. aid, for example, federal whistleblowers sounded the alarm. Other federal agencies and appointees—including leaders of the United States military—were impediments to Trump’s most dangerous and unconstitutional impulses.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

The president appears to have learned his lesson. This time, he has prepared the ground for his attack on government institutions by demonizing the people who work in them at almost every level. He may not be able to disestablish entire organizations (although he might well try), but even short of that, he can make their employees so hated by the rest of the country that they can be terrorized into obedience or resignation. Trump’s campaign against the civil service, as one manager working in the federal government told NBC News, is “psychological warfare” on a daily basis.

Trump’s suspicion of the government he leads is also why he has sent shockingly unqualified nominees to head the Defense Department, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other agencies. Think of it as a kind of political pincer attack: At the top, Trump decapitates important organizations and removes their professional staff. He replaces them with people who do not know or care about what they’re doing other than carrying out Trump’s orders. At the bottom, Musk and the president’s new hires at the Office of Personnel Management ensure that whoever is left is either a loyalist who will support such orders or someone too scared to object to them.

President Trump regards people who take their constitutional oath seriously as, by definition, his political enemies. If he is going to rule as the autocrat he wishes to be, he knows he must replace career civil servants with flunkies and vassals who will serve him and his needs above all else. His attack on public service is not about reform; it’s a first strike against a key obstacle to authoritarianism.