NOTEBOOK: Nazisplaining
And other things on my mind, including: the big idea behind DOGE and Democratic Party seedlings of hope
In my notebooks, physical or virtual, I keep a running list of stories that interest me, reactions to events, seeds of future writing. Some of these notes grow into books; some end up used as jokes on my groaning children; some die on the vine. But I thought I might occasionally share some speculative riffing on these notebook items with our supporting subscribers, as thanks.
In today’s Notebook:
— J.D. Vance goes Nazisplaining in…Germany
— Why DOGE isn’t unprecedented but part of a tradition
— And some new ideas of what a resurgent Democratic Party could look like
Nazisplaining
In his defense, Vice President J.D. Vance already had many of the leading risk factors for becoming a person who Explains Things to People. He is a man. He is a lawyer. He went to Yale. He worked in Silicon Valley. He spends time with podcasters the way some people spend time with their kids. Even so, nothing could prepare me for Vance’s words this weekend in Germany.
At the big (in?)security conference in Munich, Vance decided to Nazisplain German history to, you guessed it, Germany.
Kühn!
The Germans, he Nazisplained, are too Lugershy about their own past. Their national so-called “firewall”
that keeps the extreme right Alternative for Germany party out of coalition governments has to go, Vance said, in a remarkable intervention in the domestic politics of an ally — but also in the extraordinary, post-World War II, anti-fascist arrangements that the United States invested much time and treasure in developing.
Don’t ignore your volk, Vance told the Germans. Sometimes they want a little extremism. Let them heil a little!
So breathtaking was the vice president’s lecture that the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, rose above the customarily soporific tones of European politics to rebuke Vance’s ignorant Nazisplaining.
“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for AfD,” Scholz said on Saturday. He also made clear that Germany, which knows something or two about Nazis, “would not accept” outside advice on how to protect its democracy from internal sabotage.
All of that said, there was something baffling in European leaders’ professions of aghastness at the new administration over the weekend. In an insightful report on how an “epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance,” The Times found widespread European surprisedness:
While officials knew that the re-election of Donald J. Trump would strain the system, they have been stunned by both the ferocity and the velocity of the effort.
Really? Really? This article triggered my longstanding grievance about how Western pro-democratic leaders have been all but utterly silent about the rising anti-democratic threat in the United States. They have no problem joining projects to shore up democracy in poor countries. But not in a country with aircraft carriers! So these leaders hedge their bets, trying to avoid Trump’s rage, and are then shocked when he does, of all things, what he said he would. Maybe it’s time to start speaking out and, heaven forbid, even offering direct help to the American people to protect them from elements of authoritarian rule.
Framework supremacy
There was a revealing quote from a Silicon Valley type in Politico the other day. The figure in question was named Rohit Krishnan, and he has hit all the Valley bucket list items: engineer, economist, venture capitalist. Speak of DOGE, Krishnan said:
The focus on these guys being young misses the point. It’s like a McKinsey team. The fundamental concept is just that you throw them at the problem, they gather as much data as possible about where the money is going or who's doing what, very simple, straightforward questions. Arguably difficult answers, but straightforward questions — and then you use that information to create some sort of ranking, saying this is good, this is bad, and then you try to solve the bad. So the playbook, in some sense, is extremely simple.
The difference here is that they're applying it to areas like the government, where maybe it has never been applied, or it's really hard to apply because the downstream implications are extremely complex. It could cut off cancer research, or genomics departments are getting axed, or AIDS assistance elsewhere in the world.
The quote is revealing because it reflects the widespread Valley Guy view of the world as an engineering problem. Which it isn’t, but if that’s the only skill you have, and you’re not interested in developing other skills, then you might come to believe it’s not only of use in building bridges and running companies but also maybe deciding how schools teach or how AIDS is fought.
This view of all problems as fundamentally reducible to the kind of analysis that engineers and other business types do is farcical but widely held in the Valley — and in business generally — where not knowing about an area becomes an excuse for thinking what you do know could really help.
Domain ignorance becomes a license for framework supremacy. In fact, the less domain knowledge you have, the more heavily you have to lean on the frameworks.
And this is what the DOGE people are doing. It is NOT unprecedented. It is the McKinsey/Goldman Sachs/Gates Foundation playbook, but turned all the way up: Outsiders, far from being seen as alien to a problem and thus hopefully humble about what they don’t know about its intricacies, recast their domain ignorance as an asset. They can convert the problem into the frameworks they know a lot about — making spreadsheets and PowerPoints and doing analyses — and, once it’s in this new format, they are the new experts in town. Now that the problem has been reformatted from the language of its native domain into the language of their frameworks, they rule.
Pay attention in coming days to how the DOGE squad is using this move of trying to supplant domain knowledge with frameworks.
Wait, an actual vision?!
It is hard to overstate how lost Democrats are. I don’t mean this in a derogative way. It’s a fact. They’re the kind of lost where you don’t even know you’re lost. You can’t ask for directions because you’re not lost. Not lost at all. It’s just up ahead, that left up there. We’re not lost. Stop nagging! We’ll be there in a jiffy. Oops, now we’re dead.
Sometimes I say things like that, and senior Democrats will message or call me and say: That’s not fair at all, Anand. Right now, it’s so bad that when I say such things, I get the same calls telling me that I have no idea how bad it is, that I understated it.
But…but that is not the point of this item. The point of this item is that some people are doing some very good thinking about what the incarnation that gets the party out of the woods looks like.
I commend to you Congressman Ro Khanna’s very interesting recent guest essay in The New York Times on this score. He and I have talked about these themes in depth before, but now they’re in The Times, so, you know, it’s real…
Meanwhile, I recently received the promotional materials for a new book by the brilliant Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It’s called ABUNDANCE, and I think it has certain features in common with the Khanna vision.
I’m going to be talking to all three of them soon, and will have more to say. But suffice it to say for now that I think a few elements of the post-lost Democratic Party are coming into view.
More building, less judging. More focus on economics, less on identity. More abundance thinking, less scarcity thinking. More expansionism, less gatekeeping. More meeting people where they are, less purity and litmus tests. More fight picking, less politeness. More working people, fewer lawyers. More simple truths spoken plainly, less academic jargon. More bullying for good, less capitulation. More sweeping reformism, less tinkering.
What would you add to this list, or how would you amend it? I want your thoughts.
More civic education. 49% of people who voted looked at the smart capable democrat & then at the felon , adjudicated rapist, twice impeached liar and said, yes. I’d like more of the man who told us to inject ourselves with bleach. You guys can go on & on with what the Democrats need to do- but it’s the American people that need to hold themselves accountable first.
And I have to say that half these tech bros are either on the spectrum or dropped out of college after their sophomore year or both, never having learned what a good education teaches: that mature judgment requires that we make meaningful, ethical choices beyond mere mindless relativism. Moving fast and breaking things is what shallow little boys do. Real grownup men account for a living world of care and compassion and connection.