The U.S. DOGE Service is not the first effort to streamline the American government. But there is only one such commission that actually succeeded. During Bill Clinton’s tenure, Vice President Al Gore headed an effort to “reinvent government.” The results were that by the end of Clinton’s presidency, more than 400,000 federal jobs and thousands of pages of regulations had been eliminated. The total savings were around $140 billion, which was impressive, given that Clinton’s first federal budget was around $1.4 trillion.

Gore’s methods could not have been more different from those of DOGE, short for Department of Government Efficiency. His commission worked quietly, partnering with federal agencies, asking them to identify positions that could be cut or reassigned. It worked with Congress to change laws where necessary. Elaine Kamarck, who worked on the effort, has noted that the Gore commission did not get sued even once during its efforts.

By contrast, DOGE has gleefully taken a chain saw to the federal government, dismantling agencies and firing workers with abandon. (Many have had to be rehired within days because it turned out they were working on sensitive issues such as nuclear security or infectious diseases.) And there are now dozens of court challenges to DOGE’s actions, with one judge even questioning the constitutionality of DOGE itself.

What explains the difference? I think DOGE is in part a well-intentioned effort to get more efficiency from government, which I applaud. But a good part of it is performance art, playing into the fantasies of the MAGA movement to crush the establishment and its elites in the most humiliating way possible. In October, ProPublica revealed that the man who now heads the critical Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, said of federal workers in a private speech: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. … We want to put them in trauma.”

All this thrills a base that believes the establishment is a bunch of arrogant urban cosmopolitans who have, over the last few decades, hollowed out America and left them dispossessed. The reality, however, is that, over the last three decades, the United States has massively outperformed its rich peers — surging well ahead of Europe and Japan. As Michael Beckley notes in Foreign Affairs, “In 1995, Japanese citizens were, on average, 50 percent wealthier than Americans, measured in current dollars; today, Americans are 140 percent richer. If Japan were a U.S. state, it would rank as the poorest in average wages, behind Mississippi — as would France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. From 1990 to 2019, U.S. median household income rose 55 percent after taxes, transfers, and adjusting for inflation, with income in the bottom fifth seeing a 74 percent gain.” As the conservative former senator, Phil Gramm, has exhaustively documented, even income inequality has not actually risen when you factor in government transfer payments and taxes.

The MAGA disgust at the establishment is joined by a new “tech bro Maoism” (hat tip to James Crabtree), that like the Chinese revolutionary, glorifies disruption and destruction. Epitomized by Elon Musk, this is an attitude that says, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words, “move fast and break things.”

But is that really the best way to build companies? It isn’t how Microsoft or Google were built. It’s not how Nvidia operates. Jensen Huang, who has led the chip company for nearly 32 years, is said to view one of his crowning achievements that his company has just a 2.7% attrition rate. More important, what might work in a company does not work in building the enduring programs and institutions of government, on which people rely for stability and predictability.

And strangest of all, these nihilistic strategies are being suggested by people who have presided over the greatest creation of private sector success, innovation and wealth in human history. This same America, this same federal government, is where the information revolution exploded, where the world’s best tech companies were created and built, where AI is being pioneered and where the fortunes of the tech bro Maoists were made.

It is in this country, in fact in California, the poster child of overregulation and out of touch liberalism, that Musk, who came to North America as a penniless young immigrant from South Africa, started a string of successful companies and became the richest person in the history of humanity. It is these same governing elites who trained JD Vance in the U.S. armed forces (supposedly part of the deep state and infected by woke ideology), gave him a scholarship to a state university (more deep state) and then another to Yale Law School, arguably the most elite educational institution in America.

And the response that Musk and Vance have to that country, that government and those elites is: burn it all down.

Email: fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.