Despite Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and JD Vance’s ages—respectively, slightly older than a Boomer, solidly Gen X, and solidly millennial—they come close to representing, respectively, the ugly present, the likely future, and the lost past of conservatism. If any two of them are fighting with each other, it’s worth keeping track of who wins.
Then again, if these goofballs are leading representatives of, roughly speaking and again respectively, the trainwreck of intermingled populism and neoconservatism that the present-day Republican Party has become (Trump), something resembling libertarianism flacking for the futurist culture of Silicon Valley or Austin, TX or Mars (Musk), and our pastoral-in-multiple-senses past (Vance), then I can’t blame people for reacting by saying, the hell with any version of the right, I’ll go be a leftist.
That would be a natural reaction, but doesn’t mean it’s the correct one. Keep in mind, the left’s wrong about virtually everything.
I honestly don’t seek to be a contrarian, but I’d say the thing the left comes closest to being correct about is immigration, since individuals have the right to travel without seeking permission from any government. At the moment, though, it looks as if the left will be judged not by policy per se but by whether it’s prone to do irresponsible, almost inhuman things like take babies to potentially-violent events such as pro-immigration protests in L.A. or direct-action efforts to “de-arrest” I.C.E. arrestees. Whether the contemporary left advances any changes in law, its main long-term cultural effect may be memoirs years hence, by resentful adults who were once the leftists’ innocent teargassed children, using titles like Mommy Dearrest.
Speaking of youth, I must concede Vance may be the real long-term winner of the Musk/Trump squabble simply by biding his time and then pretending to be a calmer, saner leader. He does shoot his mouth off sometimes, but since he’s part of an age cohort most of whom can’t grasp apostrophes or pronounce both syllables of “vs.” (it’s short for “versus,” not “verse,” you dumbshits), he may always seem by contrast to be a brilliant writer and profound thinker.
As a Gen Xer, I’m less troubled by the question of whether millennial Vance will succeed Trump than by the shabby treatment Xers Rand Paul and Thomas Massie—the only good members of the Senate and House, respectively—get from the Trumpers any time either of them deviates in the slightest from what the Trumpers’ big-spending, liberty-crushing leader wants at the moment. The best outcome to all the current internal turmoil might be Musk backing Rand Paul for president in a few years, not Vance, regardless of who the Trumpers see as Trump’s natural successor. (Musk did, however, post a simple “Yes” in response to Ian Miles Cheong’s suggestion that Trump should be impeached and replaced by Vance.)
The Musk-Trump feud is all the more reason to stick to strict libertarian principles instead of letting specific personalities shape the world. And by strict principles, Trump is right to condemn Musk’s government subsidies and contracts, while Musk is right to condemn Trump’s giant budget. Both are correct that Democrats would only pour on still more waste if they were in charge.
But the current budget battle is really just the mildly Trumpified version of the same old Republican scam: a few symbolic cuts and a de facto rubber stamp for virtually all the same stupid things government has been wasting money on for decades. We shouldn’t let the anxiety caused by current infighting—or for that matter, by riots—distract us from that disappointing reality. We certainly shouldn’t let that anxiety cause us to breathe a sigh of relief when we slip back into some version of business as usual, such as letting neoconservatives run everything including spending priorities. There are worse things than impasses, gridlock, headbutting, and confusion—such as socialism or constant wars.
When you hear that Musk had to leave the White House because of incidents such as him and Sec. of the Treasury Bessent getting into a brief shoving match, much as I hate recent years’ elevation of macho showboating into a principle unto itself, you should be grateful Musk cares enough to fight. And apparently, he’s even willing to fight dirty—against Trump—if that’s the only route to budget cuts (and perhaps to getting his own pick for NASA administrator in the process).
Dirty in the current scuffle means Musk posting a pointed reminder that the Trump administration’s slow-rolling of the release of files on child-molesting billionaire Jeffrey Epstein may be caused by Trump appearing prominently in them. The latter two men partied together, and Trump joked about Epstein sharing his own preference for young women—one of them, whom Trump’s rumored to have first kissed aboard Epstein’s jet, being current First Lady Melania Trump. Maybe Trump did nothing more scandalous than that, but this is a man who, in addition to being accused of inappropriate sexual behavior by multiple women, has described himself as doing things like gleefully barging into the changing room at a teen beauty pageant he ran.
Musk’s estranged dad, Errol Musk, reportedly wants Musk to back off and stop pursuing that line of attack, though—perhaps because Dad foresees Trump, if pressed, escalating to jokes about pixie-like Grimes and Musk’s numerous other babymamas. Trump could take things up a further notch, if hostilities continue, by mocking Musk for getting himself sued during that aquatic Thai cave rescue operation a few years ago for calling the submarine operator a child-molester when he was moving too slow for Musk’s liking (perhaps a bit like the government bureaucracy moving a bit too slow for his liking now). Errol might even fear that Trump, if further harried about Epstein, could ultimately turn to mocking Errol himself, whose estrangement from Elon began when Elon was horrified by Errol impregnating the (adult) stepdaughter of Errol’s (still fairly young herself) third wife.
Elon’s interest in the files about Epstein, a man with whom both he and Trump associated in the past, may be driven in part, then, by Elon’s horror at his own family history, and the parallels with his own weird romantic track record, even as he touts his own lifestyle as part and parcel of his natalist plan for spreading humanity’s progeny to the stars. Elon likely worries there may be thin lines psychologically between having babies on Mars, dating your stepdaughter, scheming as Epstein did to create a eugenics ranch in the southwestern desert, and swaggering around the changing room at a teenage beauty pageant you run.
Oh, how pristine and noble the budget-cutting goals of D.O.G.E., the Department of Government Efficiency that Musk has just left, seem compared to all that family and partisan drama. I hope D.O.G.E. doesn’t get blown away in the strong winds of egotistical combat. Even if the drama escalates—say, if we learn Epstein is still alive in witness protection arranged by William Barr or at an Israeli-run military facility—I hope humanity’s fragile tether to fiscal reality will somehow survive it all. Even if all this has been but a psy-op to make us think fascism and rule by machines are now the only two options worth fighting over (a new Hegelian “pincer move,” as the reporter Whitney Webb might say), or if it’s all been a distraction to make a Musk pivot to partnering with the Chinese government seem more palatable, I hope an exhausted populace will have a little mental energy left over to remember econ.
As the nation’s ruling coalition appears to fission, though, columnist Dan McCarthy recommends by contrast a book on fusionism, the philosophy after my own heart that tried to yoke free-market principles to some form of stabilizing traditionalism. Daniel J. Flynn’s The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, is out this August, and part of me still longs to believe that ideas that serene and reasonable could yet carry the day.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.
