President Trump adumbrated a historical shift in American politics when, upon his return to the White House in January 2025, he invited the wealthiest, most famous entrepreneur in the world, Elon Musk, to form the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In that moment, Trump showed everyone the political future of America: an alliance between patriots and those of enormous technological ability – in Musk’s case, of technological genius.

The inspiration behind this future is ‘political rationalism.’ Like the story of Elon Musk’s engagement in politics, its full treatise has yet to be written. For now, it is worth understanding that the primary problem in American political life is not efficiency – which is a judgment about means – but rather effectiveness – which is a judgment about ends. Can you effect ends?

What The State Is

The object of the political – the civilizational – enterprise we are now undertaking is simply this: to rationalize the state, to reform it on digital platforms to achieve the ends set by the American people, both through their elections and, more generally, through the way of life Americans prefer, which both history and experience tells us centers on the family and the middle-class home. To do this, the discipline of thought and action characteristic of technological enterprise must now be applied to the nation state, to put an end to the corruption and conflicts that have paralyzed the country.

The most important political fact of our times is the popular loss of confidence in most national institutions, as polls never cease to show.¹ Americans feel that their government does not work. Recovering institutional effectiveness is, therefore, our imperative.

(There are four aspects to this endeavor, which altogether might be styled ‘digital nationalism.’ First, rationalizing the state, the object of this essay. The others, each deserving of their own treatments, concern the reforming of American communities through digital communications, commerce, and culture; then digital homesteading, turning technology toward the flourishing of the American home; and finally, reestablishing America’s posture as a benevolent commercial empire that can serve as a guide to freedom and a check on other imperial powers in foreign affairs, all of which requires technological dominance.)

Rationalizing the state requires first restating political problems in the terms closest to technological enterprises, i.e., thinking of institutions as political technologies. The state thus comes into sight as it is: a creation of modern political science, whose defining characteristics are unified sovereignty and representation, which imply impersonality and transparency.² In shorthand, officials cycle in and out of office without giving the office their character. There is no ruling class, and the majority of state actions are laws promulgated to the public before enforcement. A large part of the deliberations are public since they involve its representatives, and, nowadays, mediation through the press. The public is served in both these ways, which are designed to prevent or minimize abuse, as well as to create feedback loops to improve choice and performance.

As a product of political science, the state is akin to software. The overarching purpose of software is enlightenment, clarifying the important, ongoing processes in our world and our options for dealing with them. The relationship between “political arithmetic,” or statistics, and the state shows the state is also in the business of enlightenment.³ Hence, the state only works well when it aims to solve the problems set by the nation and to do so through decisions that can be declared publicly.

A-Changin’ the Times

It may be easier to understand political science if we start from practical predicaments.

We can describe our current situation as the repudiation of an increasingly malfunctioning state apparatus in the last several elections. Take president Trump’s fundamental issue, immigration, which concerns both who is an American citizen (as opposed to resident aliens or other categories) and what Americans know about what is going on in America.

The state is supposed to settle and enforce immigration law, yet, by 2024, it had failed so drastically that it completely reversed itself from an orientation toward enlightenment, to systematically lying to citizens about what was going on at their border, about crime, about demand for public services, and even about the act of voting itself. Not only was the state ineffective, but it was also, in some ways, not even a state anymore: consider the worries over former President Biden’s capacity to execute his office, and on-going concerns over the use of his autopen.⁴

Or, consider this: Americans really do not know just how many illegal aliens are in America. The enlightenment response would be to find out and to enforce the law; the systematic falsehood response is to swap “illegal alien” for another phrase because it is unpleasant. As if through euphemism and the threat of cancelation one could solve a fundamental problem of the state.

As with software, the state depends on algorithms, or orderly legal procedures. It also depends  on data, that is, on truthfulness. Without the state doing such work as a census, Americans would not know how many Americans there are. This is the basic level of truthfulness: that people have to answer those questions, and the state has to ask them, compile the data, and release it to the public. All the important political distinctions – citizen vs. alien, law-abiding vs. criminal, etc. – depend on truthfulness. Our commitment to justice, which is more fundamental than our partisan divides, requires that we support a state that does the business of enlightenment.

DOGE made it obvious that the need for enlightenment is dire, since Americans now know that almost nobody knows exactly what the state is or what it does.⁵ Structurally, they do not know how many agencies exist or how they relate to one another. In terms of action, they do not know who is authorized to do what. (Even something as fundamental as payments coming into the state and disbursements coming out of it remain mysterious.) As with any community, ineffectiveness breeds corruption. We need reform.

But this can only be accomplished via new digital tools that can transparently deliver the services the state is legally committed to delivering to the American people. We need new public servants committed to the public good who can master these tools.

Those wishing to promote rationalism as a political movement must look for opportunities to prove its worth. One such opportunity is presented by upgrading technology for the state, which is a generational challenge, but also an opportunity to improve all the systems involved, since new technology offers a standard of competence. It also brings up the question of effectiveness: What did you get done this week?

On such a basis, it becomes possible to make important distinctions between competent bureaucrats and the incompetent; between the honest and the deceitful actors, between the ones who believe in the mission of the state and those who oppose the electoral mandate for reform.

Moreover, systems, once installed, are generally difficult to uninstall. These kinds of improvements have major effects downstream, because they play to the cumulative character of technological progress.

But there is a much greater opportunity presented by our current change in technology, because AI gives us something we have never had before: a platform for government that can reconcile the vast, continental scale of American life, not to mention the global scale of commerce, with the limited capacities of the small number of human beings tasked with governing. The nation and the state can be connected better than ever before.

Even at the level of statistics, the databases can now become far more powerful and useful, including to people outside of tech. The promise of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” that Lincoln voiced in the Gettysburg Address can now be fulfilled to a greater degree than ever before.

Yet, another notable opportunity comes from the generational change that is also happening now, as the post-WWII cohorts retire or fade. A new generation can come into office whose experience is primarily the dysfunction of the state in the 21st century, a generation of Americans who want very much to solve these problems.

The Make America Great Again (MAGA) generation is unambiguously pro-digital technology and habituated to judge services by the high standards offered by apps. That attitude must now be applied to government services. The party that seeks reform will have them as natural allies. Moreover, this generation is used to a direct connection to the president, and to an easy familiarity with important political figures who are part of the growing reform movement.⁶ This generation is the most friendly of all to the entry of great technology entrepreneurs into government. It is almost providential that, at the moment America needs great technological reform, young Americans celebrate more figures from among the rationalists of Silicon Valley than they ever have before.⁷

Technology’s Political Conflict

Opposition to reform has been the major fact in American politics in the 21st century, and it has come from both parties, such that even political conflicts over major policies or acts of legislation have failed to produce the changes needed for the young generation to thrive. If anything, the opposition to reform has led to a bad economy, catastrophic debt, and any number of forms of paralysis in society as much as in the state.

Nothing works. This seems to be the shared premise of political antagonists, although it is only voiced by ordinary people, who are about ready to despair. It may turn out that the proper interpretation of the Trump victories is the desire to get things to work again in America. Inasmuch as the techno-geniuses have made their choice and taken their stand with Trump, the partisan conflict and the technological change are finally coming together, and it is therefore possible to come to serious decisions.

The first thing people learn about conflict is that there are only two options: you either win or you lose. This is a great advantage over the previous situation, in which many people were confused as to the outcomes, and even the optimists were indecisive.

The urgent need is for people in technology to understand some basics about politics in order to make their choices in the coming debates. The naivety of technologists, recently on display with Elon’s anger at his failure to turn DOGE into a major political victory that would save America from crushing debt, is an advantage compared to the sophisticated Washington, D.C. or media insiders who primarily live off inefficiency, decadence, or outright corruption.

This is because naive people with principles and talent can learn, and they can even learn very quickly. Whereas the idols of the marketplace reassure us that all games are or can become positive-sum, even a vague awareness of history teaches that most games, most of the time, turn out to be negative-sum. Zero-sum politics with winners and losers, with replacement of decadence by a new dedication to civilization, is much the best we can hope or act for in our circumstances.

Fear, advantage, and honor are the causes of political conflict, so Thucydides tells us.⁸ Our technological geniuses learned to fear state corruption when it brought them lawsuits and more insidious threats to their businesses. Technology is treated as a horror in most of our elite institutions, from academia to the media. Hence, a political conflict is necessary to restore the good name of knowledge, even the belief that we can acquire knowledge. It is for this reason that our political task is civilizational, not merely political. The disagreement now taking political shape concerns this question, whether authoritative impositions, mad and cruel, are all there is to human affairs, or whether there is also knowledge, that is, our access to the truth about the important things that concern and also, inevitably, divide us. Whether human beings can ever resolve disagreements rationally or only by violence.

The movement for reform will have to prove that it is learning, one conflict at a time, how the American people expect the state to deliver basic services, since the people are in one sense going to decide these conflicts. Connecting the popularity of apps to the competence of the state is now necessary simply to restore ordinary life and popular confidence. But a deeper reflection on the character of American life is also necessary to see all the ways in which digital technology is transforming it and how these changes could be to the good. Our conflicts are not simply political fights among factions; they also involve the difficulty of achieving and maintaining a shared prosperity.

By attempting to comprehend American life, technologists can come to claim with some plausibility that they have wisdom to offer, and that wisdom is always needful to government. The American economy no longer functions without the newest technology.⁹ At the same time, the major new technology companies now fulfill core regime functions everywhere – from defense to public communications, from infrastructure to education. The technological geniuses have advanced, without quite knowing what they were doing, into the center of the arena, where now they must fight and win.

But it is not possible to fight to victory without knowing what you are doing. As much as the state needs rationalizing, our technology needs to come into a reasonable relation with politics.

1. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans Trust Local Government Most, Congress Least,” Gallup, October 13, 2023. ↩︎
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Andrew Crooke, 1651), 1: “For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? … Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State (in Latin, Civitas), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people’s safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death”; Harvey C. Mansfield Jr.,“Hobbes and the Science of Indirect Government,” The American Political Science Review, no. 65(1971): 97-110. ↩︎
3. William Petty, who was Hobbes’s personal secretary, as well as, later, a charter member of the Royal Society, coined the term “political arithmetic.” See Petty, “Political Arithmetick,” in The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Charles Hull (1899). He worked for the English government in the 1660s; the word “statistics” seems to have been introduced into English by John Sinclair in the 1790s, when he compiled the “Statistical Account of Scotland,” a major project involving massive use of questionnaires and, later, investigators. Sinclair was a member of the Royal Society as well, and later a founding member of the Royal Statistical Society. Sinclair learned of statistics when he traveled through Germany as a young man. In his case, the practice of compiling data on a country to centralize knowledge was intended to help measure wellbeing, and wasn’t primarily a question of quantifying property, population, or abilities; as opposed to the German concern with capacity or strength. German thinkers of the 18th century concerned themselves with developing a science of the state, or statistics, or Staatwissenschaft. Usually, Gottfried Achenwall is credited with coining the term, in his 1749 work, Abriß der neuen Staatswissenschaft der vornehmen Europäischen Reiche und Republiken. ↩︎
4. Presidential Memoranda, “Reviewing Certain Presidential Actions,” The White House, June 4, 2025. ↩︎
5. “Elon Musk and DOGE team sit down with Bret Baier in ‘Special Report’ exclusive,” Fox News, March 28, 2025. ↩︎
6. From Theo Von to Joe Rogan, most major podcasts have invited both President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance to talk on their shows, for hours, about everything from politics to the greatest troubles in their own lives, offering a kind of intimacy previously unimaginable at the highest levels of politics. ↩︎
7. X as a forum for public discourse has allowed any number of founders to become celebrities with millions of followers, without involving any media or other elite institutions. ↩︎
8. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Classics, 1959), I, 44. In Book I, chapter 76, Thucydides has an Athenian citizen defend Athenian empire in a speech in Sparta, before the war starts, and offers this analysis of motive. ↩︎
9. Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic (New York, N.Y.: Crown Currency, 2025), 77. ↩︎