Elon Thinks it's August 4, 1789

And it might be for him, but not for the rest of us

Portrait of Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau by Joseph Boze, shared by the Musée Granet. And I added the powder under his nose.

***Hey! Next week’s podcast will be a Q&A, so please send your questions, comments, and psyche-shattering thunder dunks to questions@imightbewrong.org.

---

On the night of August 4, 1789, there was a buzz around the French National Constituent Assembly. The very fact that there was a National Constituent Assembly had already put a tingle in the delegates’ pantaloons: Less than two months earlier, they had stood up to the king and won. Three weeks before, a mob celebrated Bastille Day by storming the Bastille. The mood in France at that moment was a mix of exhilaration, fear, disquiet, and, of course, horniness, because: France.

In that atmosphere, a member of Club Breton — a forerunner of the Jacobins — stepped forward in the Assembly and proposed an end to feudalism. It might be accurate to say that the proposal went well, though it would definitely be accurate to say that the proposal went weird. Because the delegate’s speech set off a chain reaction of delegates stepping forward to renounce feudal privileges, with each speech being more impassioned and extreme than the last. By all accounts, the atmosphere got nuts in a hurry; the delegates ended up pulling an impromptu all-nighter in which they one-upped each other denouncing the evils of the Ancien Régime (that they had been part of until 10 minutes before). Did you ever have a night in college — perhaps aided by controlled substances like soda pop and herbal tea — when you and your friends decided to form a band, start a business, and refurbish an old Airstream trailer so you could travel around the world? That’s the night that the Assembly had on August 4: Everything was possible, the sky was the limit, they had ascended to a higher plane of consciousness known as The Realm Of Kicking Ass Forever.

This, I think, is where Elon believes he is right now. I’ve spent the last few weeks confounded by DOGE’s project: Elon is auditing the federal budget, which many people have done before, and the novel tools he’s bringing to the effort are artificial intelligence, a platoon of elite math twinks, and total disregard for the law. Why would anyone think that would produce good results? But his likely mindset came into focus when I scrolled through Elon’s Twitter feed and the feeds of some of his most ardent backers. I think Elon and his stans imagine that they’re in a historic moment; they’re convinced that they’re onto something big. And — though I know nothing about the recreational habits of Elon or his team — I will point out that a wide range of psychotropic drugs exist nowadays that can replicate the euphoric rush that the French delegates probably felt on the night of August 4. Take that for what you will.

Political nerds often forget that politics is mind, ass, and soul-numbingly boring. Sure, politics is interesting to us, but we have a disease sort of like that fixation that makes people eat sofa cushions. Any normal person is driven to madness by the endless litany of legislative circle jerkery (to use a term of art) that comprises democratic lawmaking. It’s normal to want to cut through the bullshit. It’s like weight loss: You could embark on a strict diet-and-exercise regimen that will cause you to shed one pound a week, or you could listen to some jacked geezer on TikTok who says that the fast track to six pack abs is eating a whole raw pumpkin once a month. The “one weird trick” is always appealing.

It’s also normal to want to believe that you’re living in a historic moment. The great underappreciated threat to the developed world might be boredom: We want to be important people fighting existential battles, so we invent dragons to slay and embark on social media crusades like toilet-bound Don Quixotes. A crucial component of all of our psyches is that we matter; we want to be big, important people doing cool and memorable things. Which heightens the tendency to believe “this is it, IT’S HAPPENING — I’m part of a project that will be the subject of ballads, epic poems, and self-fellating 50th anniversaries like what SNL is doing right now.”¹

I was part of a project that felt that way once. The early days of the John Oliver show felt like we were part of something groundbreaking and important. I know now that what we were doing was neither; we were making an arguably-pretty-good version of The Daily Show. But I was amped up on Red Bull, the excitement of having quit my day job after nine years as a comedy part-timer, and the omnipresent desire to tell everyone who ever doubted me to suck it. So, I deluded myself into thinking I was part of a paradigm-shifting project, even though in hindsight, it was…fine. It was some fucking TV show. And it was a mixed bag, as most things in the universe are.

The period after August 4, 1789 was met with similar sobriety. The attention-grabbing headline that FEUDALISM HAS BEEN ABOLISHED was followed by inconvenient questions about what, exactly, that meant. Feudalism arguably had been abolished centuries ago, and was replaced by a system of taxation and noble rights that was hard to unwind. There was also the awkward fact that the Assembly had talked a big game about property rights, and here they were saying “nah fuck that”. The devil was in the details, and France spent the next few years hammering out those details, with “hammering out the details” being a euphemism for “murdering each other as quickly as possible until they were all murdered out.”

DOGE is showing similar disregard for details, and that’s if you round the Constitution down to “a detail”. They’ve made shocking mistakes: They fired nuclear safety employees and then had to scramble to re-hire them, fired FAA technicians seemingly because they misunderstood the meaning of “probationary”, and cut funding for a program that helps disabled kids transition to life after high school, possibly because the program has the phrase “transition support” in its title. They’ve taken to posting bemused screenshots that prove that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing — they’re like the world’s most naive American on vacation in the UK posting “Whoa they call FRIES CHIPS over here and CHIPS are something else why doesn’t the media talk about this?!?!? Arguments that these mistakes are all worth it — tales of omelets and broken eggs and all that — would be more convincing if DOGE had made any noticeable impact on government spending, but they haven’t.

There are no quick fixes; the Realm Of Kicking Ass Forever only exists in our imaginations and for the Boston Celtics in the ‘60s. We can get a buzz on and convince ourselves otherwise, but that doesn’t make it true. Elon is currently rolling — he’s feeling the momentum that the delegates must have felt on that fateful night in France, and he’s probably also feeling the effects of several other substances. But tomorrow always comes, and reality always comes with it.

---

1. It can be self-fellating and deserved, and in my opinion, it’s clearly both.