Babus vs DOGE: Learnings from Yes Minister

The central premise of the classic British comedy Yes Minister is a continuous battle of wits between James Hacker, the minister, and Sir Humphrey Appleby, the superbureaucrat who sabotages the minister’s every policy move. Humphrey does this because, the way he sees it, Britain is simply too important to be left to politicians, who, swaying with every opinion poll like reeds in the wind, would surely drive the country into oblivion if left unsupervised. Bureaucrats, classically educated ‘adults in the room’ like him, ensure national stability by guaranteeing nothing of consequence ever actually happens.

Throughout history, we’ve been sold the fairy tale that democracy is a battle between competing political ideologies. But it is actually between politicians and bureaucrats, the elected vs the selected, the temporary vs the permanent.

Enter Elon Musk’s latest creation: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), which represents perhaps the most flamboyant salvo in this ancient bureaucrat-politician war since Mao decided China’s administrators needed to experience the character-building joy of manual farm labour. Watching bureaucrats squirm under DOGE’s scrutiny evokes memories of that Cultural Revolution – except then ‘they’ were called bourgeois revisionists; now they are called Deep State.

Both Musk and Mao wanted radical change to happen – and happen quickly. Mao believed in a Communist utopian vision. Musk champions its diametric opposite – a Capitalist future where efficiency and shareholder value reign supreme. Indeed, he appears to be crafting a govt that is accountable primarily to shareholders (taxpayers who fund it, with your benefit from the state proportional to your contribution) rather than stakeholders (those who benefit without contributing). 

But Musk is only a front in the battle that Trump wages against the educated elite that has ruled US for decades behind the facade of govts of different political ideals. A radical populism (yes, Mao was popular too) seeks to define democracy as direct, as opposed to more indirect forms championed by philosophers like Plato, where state power lies in the hands of an educated elite. 

Perhaps Sir Humphrey captured the bureaucratic ethos best when he declared, “Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century – politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon.” Whether DOGE will succeed remains to be seen. After all, bureaucracy is humanity’s most resilient organism, capable of surviving nuclear winters, regime changes, and the march of history.