This meshes well with the established policies of the Republican party, which is to campaign on how badly the Government runs, promise to fix it, get into office, then break the Government more, then run back to your constituency and say "I can't believe how bad the Government is, get me back in there so I can keep working on it."

They’ve long abandoned the pretense of fixing anything, and have gotten a lot of buy in from their base to just torch stuff and leave it in ruins.

Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.

To be fair, conservative ideologues over-shrinking the US government is an improvement on conservative ideologues invading foreign countries, which happened last conservative-populist time.

So at least we're not invading Iraq?

Depends why you objected to the Iraq war, I think. From a moral perspective, green lighting the permanent ethnic cleansing of Gaza sure seems worse to me.

They're talking about invading Canada.

And Greenland.

And Mexico, and Gaza for that matter!

This is the classic 3 step plan.

Step 1. Destroy the old

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Profit!

"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.

Step 1. Destroy the government

Step 2. See? The government doesn't work! Just like we said!

Step 3. "Fix" the problems created from Step 1

Step 4. MAGA eventually realizes the swamp was enlarged and made worse, not drained

What makes you think that step 4 will ever occur?

Step 4. MAGA sees more government inefficiency and corruption than ever, but is reassured that it's just those terrible liberals sabotaging DOGE's good work and the NEXT round will really purge them

You are being too kind to those young people. One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.

Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.

> One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.

The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.

Fuck, that sounds familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds

I wonder if the DOGE kids will be also sent off to the countryside once they're not useful anymore...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sent-down_youth

That's what happened to Vivek.

Vivek quit DOGE voluntarily when he realized that Musk was completely off his rocker and wanted no part of it.

I was mostly just joking about him going off and running for Ohio governor. It does give "send the defeated noble to the frontier" vibes.

> It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:

> Step 1. Destroy the old.

> Step 2. Build the new.

Feels very 'cultural revolution'-y

> Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.

And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.