In calling Trump the “reverse” FDR, Harrington claims that President Franklin Roosevelt was simply restoring “trust” to US institutions, but in reality, he was transferring constitutional authority from Congress to the executive branch along with confiscating wealth and property from owners of private property. Apparently, Harrington confuses the accumulation of raw state power with a restoration of trust. The New Deal was not a “restoration” project but rather a series of policies that undermined the trust relationships that are necessary for an economy to thrive. Indeed, much of FDR’s anti-business rhetoric was aimed at convincing Americans to lose trust in everything else but government.

Furthermore, her claim that DOGE is undermining “trust” is contradicted by the fact that DOGE investigators have uncovered evidence that the Biden administration betrayed trust by creating multi-billion-dollar slush funds to hand taxpayer money to politically-connected people and organizations. Likewise, while Harrington wants us to believe that all USAID moneys were spent providing medical care and food to poor people overseas, much of the agency’s appropriations were spent on private non-profit organizations and paying for favorable coverage from US journalists and their organizations.

While one can disagree with the tactics of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and question DOGE’s long-term effectiveness, Harrington’s simple-minded approach ignores the fact that the Biden administration engaged in the corruption of institutions ranging from the courts and law enforcement to national security No doubt, the typical NYT reader ignores Biden’s transgressions and enthusiastically believes Harrington.

Although many of Harrington’s observations are almost amusingly naïve, it is clear that she represents an elite constituency that believes it never should be out of power—and people who are not like her should have no political influence at all. Writes Leonard:

…progressives’ views, in fact, can be seen to exemplify an illiberal tendency in American progressivism, which manifests in the tension between the progressive desire to uplift oppressed groups, and the progressive desire to socially control groups seen to be a threat to the social and economic order. Social control of inferior groups, like all eugenic thought, opposed the moral equality of human beings – indeed, it is predicated upon human hierarchy.

For now, she and her kind have little political control over the federal government. One hopes that will be the case for a long time.