Over the last few days I’ve been hearing stories (anecdotes, really) about a rapid scaling up of pressure on workers from a few separate and distinct corporate contexts. I also sat in a meeting this week in which a senior administrator described the early details of new systems of workplace management designed to ensure that faculty were doing a “fair” amount of work. Anecdotes though they are, when combined with the horrors of DOGE they feel like a concerted effort on the part of the employer class to recreate then reap the rewards of worker precarity.

The Silicon Valley Tech Bros have made clear their rage against the very idea that workers should be able to make any kind of demands about the nature and governance of their workplaces. Wage growth and the concomitant freedom of movement that this implies is, to their minds, at the core of worker rebelliousness. The idea that if workers get paid too much they get uppity is the clear line that links the Tech Bros to both the traditional corporate ownership class and to the petit bourgeois that runs rural America. Moreover, all of these groups (along with right-affiliated economists) have long felt that government employment serves to distort the labor market and unfairly increase the bargaining power of workers.

For these folks, wage growth and worker mobility are the source of other “problems.” Frustration with inflation during Covid was, as much as anything, frustration with an increase in the wages that other people get paid. Wage growth was one of the most important drivers of inflation and contributed to some of the more annoying trends of the period, including rising restaurant prices, increasingly large demands for gratuities, and the inability of businesses to keep workers on staff. The rising price of produce is linked to the higher wages that workers demand for picking fruits and vegetables.

These folks pay attention to one another; they talk in country clubs and follow the same newsletters and sometimes sit on the same corporate boards. They can see Elon tightening the screws on the government workforce and it makes them believe, even at this very early date in Trump 47, that they can tighten the screws on their own workforces. It won’t be long, after all, until the labor pool is a lot more liquid and much more favorable for employers, so why not cut out the bad wood now (the employees who don’t want to be screeched at while sitting in a pressure cooker) in anticipation of a much more desperate workforce in a few months.

I’m curious about other reports of a shift in management tactics in the last six weeks. Is this all just conjecture or is there something to it?

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It may even insist that it can wonder, but it's all just a modestly convincing illusion.

Things seem to be falling apart at a very fast pace.

The big difference between Trump’s first term and what’s happening now is that he wasn’t ready, at all, the first time around. This resulted in somewhat competent people being in most of the most important administration positions, at least until the latter stages of the term.

This time, things are very different. The personnel in Trump’s second administration reflect perfectly this quote from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Tommy Tuberville, though not yet in the administration itself, reflects the quality of the sort of people Arendt was talking about, and who now completely dominate the administration:

U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville on Monday claimed there are entire teams of transgender girls participating in women’s high school sports, but did not provide any evidence to back up his assertion.

The Alabama Republican made the claim while championing his bill to ban to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports under Title IX during an appearance on the “Megyn Kelly Show.”

“It is a very, very touchy subject. Do you know, Megyn, that there’s some high school teams in this country – in blue states – are totally biological boys? It is a disgrace, it is a disgrace what’s going on,” Alabama’s senior senator told the SiriusXM radio host.

This is some combination of crazy delusion and Goebbels-level lie: In a nation of 340 million people, it’s extremely difficult to find ANY trans girl athletes competing in high school athletics anywhere in the United States, as in literally any:

Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) . . . told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, an organization advocating for banning transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.

A key element of fascism is that it requires and produces a complete collapse of anything resembling intellectual standards. Another quote from Arendt’s great work, which is now more relevant than when it was first published nearly 75 years ago:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

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