You sit in a cubicle. You stand behind a cash register. You press your knees into the ground, straining to fix a burst pipe. It is a Thursday at 11 a.m., and you are at work. Are you free?
Professor Elizabeth Anderson in her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It) says, in a way, no. You are not in a democracy in your workplace; you’re under a private government run by a dictator: your boss. The rules are set. And you—especially if you’re not in a union—have almost no say.
As the New Yorker noted, Anderson’s idea hits on a “striking American contradiction.” Private Government shows how, “on the one hand, we are a freedom-obsessed society, wary of government intrusion into our private lives; on the other, we allow ourselves to be tyrannized by our bosses, who enjoy broad powers of micromanagement and coercion.”
Since Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, two CEOs, took the reins of the United States government, I have been thinking a lot about Anderson’s theory of bosses as dictators.
Musk and Trump have framed a series of blatantly anti-democratic and disruptive executive branch actions as the efficient maneuverings of “high-IQ” businessmen. The president has signed a series of executive orders that are likely illegal, as he stretches the law in the name of his “mandate.” Musk and his legion of engineers have been dismantling the government under the righteous banner of fighting “fraud.” If the violent January 6 riot was a seditionist insurrection, how should one describe the 2025 version of a MAGA takeover?
The moves by DOGE, Musk, and Trump—running roughshod over norms and republican democracy—seem more familiar to me than armed revolt. It’s downsizing; it’s layoffs; it’s control by one annoying guy who for some reason is richer than you and is convinced that “working the weekend is a superpower.” It’s government run like a business. (Specifically a start-up.) The president not as democratic leader within a system of checks and balances, but as an imperious CEO with the power to do what’s needed. It’s dictator as boss, and boss as dictator.
I think when you consider that businesses are run by dictators—that a firm is not a democracy—it makes sense why a series of rich guys at the top of the capitalist world think government can be run without following any laws. I called up Anderson to discuss all this. We talked about DOGE, Musk, capitalism, and much else.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
How do you think understanding your boss as a dictator helps us make sense of what’s happening right now in the Trump administration?
Once we grasp that the default constitution of the capitalist workplace is a dictatorship—that the business class feels that it’s infinitely superior to government workers; that they think they could clean things up and make things way more efficient by running government as a “business”—we realize what they’re essentially saying is: We gotta run government like a dictatorship, a place where the boss rules.
That’s the picture. And so, they think these bosses can ignore all the regulations and constraints on the internal operation of the agencies; they can fire people at will without cause; they can just go through smashing and disrupting stuff—and, somehow, innovation will come out of it.
It’s this Ayn Rand-ian element of glorifying the megalomaniacal CEO. Musk can say: Let me do my thing, because I am the brilliant, disruptive innovator who’s going to transform everything. But I can only do that if I can fire people en masse and destroy all industries—so that I can emerge as the hero.
Rand’s idea of freedom was that the smart people, like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, were screwed by rules and restrictions on the talented. And so we need to free people like him and other brilliant CEOs to do whatever they want. The key is not empathy but empowering the right people. And whatever happens to other people, so be it.
Exactly, because Rand thinks those other people don’t matter—deep down.
That’s why under capitalism now there’s a selection effect. It is the megalomaniacs—the narcissists—who rise to the top, given the incentive structure of the system. But, you know, these narcissists…they’re very thin-skinned. In their inner psychic lives they feel wounded every time somebody doesn’t worship them.
Which sounds a lot like anyone’s annoying boss—powerful and thin-skinned. It also helps me understand why so many on the right are obsessed with IQ. It can’t be that bosses got lucky. It has to be that they are naturally destined to rule.
Musk is a classic example of this. He has had genuine entrepreneurial success. I’ll grant him that. But he thinks that it’s because he has general intelligence. IQ is actually only measuring like a tiny part of intelligence. Musk is a total idiot when it comes to public policy. He believes any kind of crap that some idiot posts on X. He has no sense of reality outside of his business. He just goes smashing through, thinking that he’s a great innovator; in fact, he’s wrecking everything.
The capitalist firm, as it is set up right now, rewards that kind of person.
Right, and it rewards the kind of people who think that the rest of us are nobodies and it doesn’t matter what happens to us.
Right now, there’s the abstract boss behavior: I am the ruler, god of government, I don’t have to follow the rules for executive orders. And also the literal ways in which they’re acting like a boss: Elon Musk telling employees to send me an email of five things you did this week or you will be fired. How do you connect those two things?
The history of all right-wing parties is their base is business owners—small, medium, and large. And the capitalist firm is a dictatorship, that’s its constitution. The boss, whatever he says, goes.
Most American workers who are not unionized have false ideas about their entitlement to a job. Most American workers are not aware that the default status of employment is at will. You can be fired at any time, for any reason (except for like a handful of anti-discrimination rules).
That power changes how bosses think. They don’t think they have to follow rules. They can do what they want to you.
Then you look wider. What are the objectives of so many policies over the last 50 years of neoliberalism? It’s plutocracy: To make capitalists rule, not just within the firm. That’s happening now. They get to be the bosses of everything.
That makes me think of the radicalization of the supposedly “normal” Silicon Valley types. I listened to a podcast with Marc Andreessen. He’s among many rich tech people who talked about being radicalized to vote for Trump. And he didn’t say it started with President Joe Biden’s attack on tech or Black Lives Matter protests. He said: I was radicalized around 2012 by all the annoying “kids” working for me. His experience as a boss is a big part of what moved him further right.
That’s exactly right. The problem that the tech bros got into is that in order to attract talented engineers for their start-ups they had to give them a lot of power within the firm. You attract a lot of talent if the workers feel like they’re empowered and they’re being listened to and treated with respect.
But then that turned in the 2010s. At some point, the tech bros become billionaires. Then, they feel miffed. The money goes to their heads! They feel like they’re Superman. Why aren’t people respecting them? And this is where respect means following orders, keeping your silence—it’s not your place to talk back to them, because look at how much richer they are than you. And they started getting pissed off.
That merges with the ideology of the tech world, where there is a cult of the founder. And it can turn into dictatorial ideology. Now, we have nutcases like Curtis Yarvin whispering about the benefits of monarchism.
Now it’s not just rulers of their company. They think they ought to be rulers of the world.
The philosophy changes as it appeals to what they need. Monarchism becomes appealing when you’ve been a monarch in a company.
Another point here is that often the tech bros have been cast as libertarian-right. They just want freedom. But, no, what they want is freedom for themselves. They want impunity for themselves to do whatever they like. That is to be free of government regulation, but also to be free of criticism.
They always billed themselves as libertarians, but in reality there’s always been a symbiotic relationship between libertarianism and authoritarianism within the capitalist firm. And once you’re a billionaire, you have a much bigger footprint than just your firm. You can affect whole states just by threatening to leave, like Amazon.
When you talk about Amazon like that, it reminds me of what you mentioned earlier, when you talked about the goal of neoliberalism. That term can be confusing. But really—and I think I am getting this right from Quinn Slobodian’s book—it’s that many people in the 20th century and during decolonization wanted money and capital to float freely above the constraints of a specific country. This gave businesspeople supreme power, and it gave companies power to act like nation-states themselves.
You’re totally right about that. It was in the 70s, somebody wrote a book called The Sovereign State of ITT. ITT was this big, sprawling, global company of its day. And basically it said: Look, this is not, you know, just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill corporation. It really is acting like a sovereign state. That’s what we have today in spades, with these much bigger, more powerful companies than ITT ever was.
What do you think being in charge of one of those companies, like Musk and Trump have been, makes you think of democracy?
Well, what good is it? I mean, that’s what they think.
That was there for a long time in Silicon Valley culture: disruption. What was disruption? I’m going to walk in there and start breaking a lot of laws and establish my business model. And that’s essentially how Uber got launched—ignore, just completely disregard, laws.
The thing is, many people want this. They want to see government “run the government like a business.”
Like a dictatorship, is what they’re saying.
There is a grain of truth in some of this: private for-profit corporations make decisions much quicker than the bureaucracies of democratic states do. Absolutely, that’s true. And so what happens is, when you have an encounter between what are these very successful corporate types and a civil servant, they just look at the civil servant and they think: These guys are idiots; I can run circles around them. To a certain extent, it’s due to the fact that there’s been a systematic repression and defunding for a lot decades of government, too.
I was actually thinking more about the obsession with Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. Which is to say that so often it seems totally fine to many people not to have a democracy as long as the streets are clean. It’s popular.
But also, we also have to factor in the fact that people don’t know what the government does for the middle class—it’s enormous, but it’s hidden. It’s buried in the tax code, like the mortgage interest deduction, the fact that you don’t pay income taxes on employer-covered health care, these enormous tax advantages, the tax deferral of your pension plan. It’s there for the better-off middle class.
That’s the neoliberalism part: It was about both freeing markets and the government working through markets—so we hid the government’s work.
I mean, what’s interesting about DOGE is it will take a while for the American people to realize that this random, nihilistic destruction—just for the gleeful destruction of it all—actually comes back to bite. Because people are unaware of how much they depend on government services. Still, now you’re starting to see people show up at town halls yelling. Veterans can’t book an appointment at a Veterans Affairs hospital. They serve their country, and now they’re getting screwed over. They’re getting pissed, not to mention that almost a third of civil servants are veterans.
Another example: you can look at it both from the employment perspective and the consumer perspective. The National Park Service has been gutted, so now people who would spend their vacation camping out at Yellowstone, maybe they can’t get a reservation because the systems have broken down.
Well, everything is broken.
