While there is a lot of attention correctly paid to Republicans’ radical–which is to say, awful and bigoted–ideas regarding race and gender (including women’s freedom, reproductive and otherwise), there is less attention paid to their radical ideas about economics. They really do believe if federal government spending is cut by forty to fifty percent, including most of the non-security spending, the economy will bloom and people’s lives will be better. It’s utterly bonkers and what I used to call batshitloonitarian, but they truly do believe this. This isn’t a new ideology for conservatives, but it was relegated somewhat to the extremes of the party as well as tempered by an unwillingness to violate Article I of the Constitution. Now, there are no constraints, and the extremists are the mainstream (in my opinion, the median of both the Republican House and Senate caucuses are fully on-board with this in principle, if not on board in terms of political feasibility).

Once you believe there’s a glorious end time to reach, suffering along the way doesn’t matter. This is why they keep using phrases like “This is a period of transition.” The only analogy that might make sense to those on the left-ish side of the spectrum is if there were a transition to real universal healthcare–and I would like to think we wouldn’t be such cruel dicks about it and try to limit the damage to the affected workers and industries.

This is why many of the arguments along the lines of “Don’t they realize that Awful Policy X will lead to Horrible Outcome Y?” or complaints about how ‘DOGE’ isn’t really identifying actual fraud have no purchase with them: these are desired outcomes, and any harm along the way is collateral damage that will lead to the Great Conservative Paradise*.

*Offer only applies to white Christian men and their subordinate helpmeets, others need not apply.