The left and right can agree on one thing: Our government is a joke on the United States

The theme chosen by the anti-Trump protesters who took to the streets on April 5 — “Hands Off” — was considered vague even by sympathetic observers and gave rise to a number of interesting questions, such as: “Which hands?” and “Off what — or whom?” In the favored interpretation, the hands belonged to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and the object of desire was the pristine body of the federal bureaucracy. The protesting hordes, apparently, wanted to keep the government just the way it is.There is, I have observed, a peculiar variety of liberal conservatism that insists nothing must ever change — the ecology must remain untouched and the cities must remain undeveloped in this best of all possible worlds. Progressivism, once a revolutionary faith, has evolved into your elderly grandmother, confused by the bustle of modern life and afraid of the new.Government, from the progressive perspective, exists to freeze society and nature into a comfy stasis.Only genders are allowed fluidity.

Everything else, very much including government, is “settled science,” fixed for all time.A couple of catchphrases were thrown around at the time of Barack Obama’s presidency to explain the inviolability of government.One was “Government is the name of the things we do together,” which, if true, would confirm my long-held belief that every baseball team is the equivalent of an independent state.Another was “You didn’t build that” — implying the government actually built everything — further implying a universe in which NASA bailed out Musk’s SpaceX rather than, as we imagined, the other way around.When it comes to government, the Obama era might as well be the Neolithic.Today the slick slogans work only as laugh lines: We know too much.We know government from the outside as the clattering suit of armor worn, during four madcap years, by a senile president.We are learning about it from the inside because DOGE has ...