Hey, Elon. You Know Who Else Was a Disruptor? Mao
Donald Trump and the Tesla boss aren’t the first to take a wrecking ball to government. They’d be wise to learn from China’s tragic experience.
Continuous revolution.
Photographer: XINHUA/AFP/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump and allies like Elon Musk delight in portraying themselves as governmental revolutionaries. But they are hardly the first leaders to attempt to blow up a “deep state” they see as coddled, inefficient, and ideologically opposed to their agenda. They’d be wise to consider the record of such heedless assaults more closely.
The most dramatic similar experiment took place nearly 60 years ago in China — with predictably disastrous results. Megalomaniac dictator Mao Zedong saw the bureaucrats in his government as obstacles to building a socialist worker’s paradise. He suspected them of disloyalty and feared they would undermine his radical agenda of continuous revolution.