For we who promote limited government, Musk’s behavior is a betrayal insofar as it risks the advantage of this unique historical moment.

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that 25-year-old DOGE staffer Marko Elez was, in fact, a “special government employee” and could access U.S. Treasury Department payment systems. Later that day, Elez resigned. In the intervening hours, a fracas had erupted around the revelation that Elez had posted a variety of racially hostile messages on social media — supporting, for example, “eugenic immigration policy” and insisting that “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” among other missives. Even despite the DOGE team’s tolerance for controversy, this was too much.

At least, it was for a while. In a typically naughty post, Elon Musk asked his fans if he should “Bring back the DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” — a post accompanied by poll that is all but certain to produce the most provocative result. We must assume Musk was referring to Elez because Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old serial entrepreneur and heir to a popcorn fortune whose businesses have digital connections to Russian and Chinese entities and who went by the handle “Big Balls,” is still on DOGE staff — at least, for now.

Among those for whom politics is an alternative form of entertainment, there seems to be something satisfying in performances like these — the high art of shock and incitement. But striking an incendiary posture on social media is not what the platform Donald Trump devised for Musk is for. Indeed, for those of us who promote limited government as a superior theory of social organization, Musk’s behavior is a betrayal insofar as it risks the advantage of this unique historical moment.

Recall the sense of utter resignation Democrats couldn’t even mask in the wake of Joe Biden’s defeat. The party’s discombobulation was so total that it seemed as if all their cherished preconceptions were suddenly up for debate — the virtue of sprawling, clientelist, profligate central governance among them. In a display of previously inconceivable supplication, Democrats lined up to participate in and lend a veneer of bipartisan legitimacy to Musk’s venture.

Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz swiftly joined the DOGE congressional caucus, and he predicted that “more Dems will join the caucus” in the coming weeks. Representative Ro Khanna expressed his intention to work with Musk and company. Moderate Democrats like Ritchie Torres and Greg Landsman submitted their own small government initiatives DOGE might pursue, like streamlining governmental forms and paring back permitting requirements. Even if it was only to launder their boutique priorities into the discourse around the desirability of a smaller governmental footprint, the concession that “Elon Musk is right” from progressive quarters amounted to declarations of surrender.

It was, in a way, a second victory for Donald Trump — one that held out the promise of something more seismic. In much the same way that Republican governors managed to compel dark-blue municipal Democrats to make the same arguments that border hawks had been making for years (often using the same language) for the low, low cost of a bus ticket, Republicans had achieved on November 5 something greater than an electoral win. They had managed to get some Democrats to concede that big government is not necessarily good government.

Musk’s subsequent conduct has scuttled whatever opportunities there were to compel Democrats to ratify Republican priorities. “Sadly,” Landsman told Punchbowl News, “this has become a way for the wealthiest person alive, who gets billions in federal money, to hack the federal government data and payment system at the expense of the American people.” Khanna denounced the “unconstitutional efforts to block funding appropriated and authorized by Congress” on which DOGE has set its sights. “Whether I stay in the caucus, I think, is questionable,” said Moskowitz, its earliest Democratic adopter. “I don’t need to stay in a caucus that’s irrelevant.”

All this Democratic discomfort is sure to thrill those for whom political victories are only measured by the degree to which their political adversaries resent them. But that’s cold comfort for those who want to popularize the concept of small, efficient government. Indeed, if the polling is any indication, Musk has increasingly become a millstone around the necks of limited-government conservatives:

Musk is at the “trough of his popularity,” CNN’s Harry Enten observed. And voters increasingly see him as “the face of this administration,” the analyst added citing a 700 percent increase in Google searches for Musk’s name versus this time last year.

Advocates of a nimbler, cost-effective federal government should want the public to associate that philosophy with outcomes they like. They will turn from it if they see it as a vehicle for caprice, monomania, and childish provocation for its own sake. That effect may already be underway.

Musk’s fans do him and his project no favors by cheering on his more puerile instincts, of course. More than that, they’re undermining conservatism’s central project and providing Democrats with a popular cause around which they can reorganize a coherent opposition to the Trump administration. If that’s what it means to “own the libs” these days, the libs don’t seem to mind it.