One detail about Elon Musk's radical attacks on the federal government that chorded with many people is in the era of Musk's companions.
Some are in their early 20s. One is 19 years old and has been named “Big Ball” On Twitter. Others are reposting content White nationalist. The name 25-year-old Marco Erez seems to have gone too far by boasting about social media about being a racist who doesn't marry outside of his ethnicity. He was forced to resign. (Vice President JD Vance hopes that the young man will return to work.)
They are compared with “Children's children” Of the Pentagons of the 1960s, it was “the brightest and brightest” that brought Vietnam. That's not a correct analogy. With's kids had degrees from the best schools, most of them in their 30s and 40s. They were younger than the grey bureaucrats who generally presided over the Department of Defense.
What's happening now is best understood as an American homemade Mao Zedong explosion. The Cultural Revolution, announced by Chairman Mao in 1966, was led by an infuriated young executive. They marched to universities and government agencies, dragging people with suspicion of bourgeois values and counter-revolutionary sentiment.
They didn't mind that eliminating people in charge of large institutions, even the point of starvation, leading to great suffering. Chaos was the key. The old guard was very mean and was such a traitor to Mao and China, so extreme measures had to be taken. Does it sound familiar?
They used dehumanised language in exactly the same way that Musk and Trump described USAID employees as: “Radical Madman” “Criminal organization. ”
The youths of the Chinese cultural revolution had what the shock forces of masks had: the pure certainty of the crystalline young and ignorant. Speaking as someone who was a passionate libertarian at age 20, I am well versed in the intoxicating power of knowing that you understand what so many older people don't get. In my case, it was the exact same revelation that the Tech Brothers shut down USAID and terrorized the Treasury. The government was almost completely incompetent and borderline evil.
When you reach a ripe old age of 30 or 35, you have seen enough of the complexity of the world where, in most cases, you lose that revolutionary fire. You still believe things, but you know that the truth is subtle and that most people, institutions, ideologies are an incomplete combination of good and bad.
You usually don't have the misguided confidence to step into a government office that you may not have known that you existed a week ago, and work at that agency. Start rudely interrogating people who are as old as your parents. They may not support plans to fire hundreds of people, abandon the rest, and stop all agents' projects.
In China's Cultural Revolution, an 18-year-old did it all. They defeated the target by the wild beast until they confessed to an imaginary thought crime. We are not there yet, but our desire to humiliate older people with their expertise and degree is the same. The rog arrogance of the Tech Brothers is the same as the young Maoist from 60 years ago.
In Silicon Valley language, their youth and inexperience are not bugs, they are distinctive features. It makes them stronger and faithful, and does not expose them to doubts or constraints that will happen to older, more experienced people.
Those who shake up our constitutional order may not have studied James Madison, the constitution, the check, the balance, or how our government should work. So when critics warn that it could destroy the founder's system, it sounds like a success. Like their leader, Musk, they imagine that expertise in one or two fields gives universal capabilities in all fields.
The young Chinese people who led violent purity in the 1960s knew that they were purer than the people they were persecuted because they were raised entirely under communism. They knew the Maoist philosophy just as the technological brothers knew coding and venture capital.
And they have another invincible Muschia and Trumpian argument against the elderly bureaucrats they are abusing: money. If these people are actually capable, why aren't they rich? Musk's poorest members probably hired more in SpaceX or Tesla than the most senior bureaucrats last year, winning a nearly unknown team.
Silicon Valley: People who earn $110,000 a year as losers have a word.
Remember that the young executives around him are not worried about destroying the system as the masks attack our government with new targets every day. No one does in the Cultural Revolution.
Jeremy D. Mayer is an associate professor of policy and government at George Mason University and co-author.“A changing political south.”
