Attempting to explain Trump’s actions based on old-fashioned political assessments, assuming rational, practical motives, is a fool’s errand – and a total waste of time.
He and his most rabid followers are motivated by visceral feelings like prejudice, anger, hate, insecurity and fear, not analytical thought.
So the answer to “Why is he doing [x]?” is not to be found in the kind of analysis that most American reporters are trained to do. He has few coherent national policy goals other than checking the usual GOP boxes to cut taxes on the obscenely rich, free corporate robber barons from regulation and pretend to cut the deficit while doing the opposite.
Rather, his politics represent a kind of lashing out in hatred of which there are only a few precedents in American history — say, the McCarthy era and the official blessing at many levels for the Ku Klux Klan in the late 19th and early 20th century. So, the types of questions we need to ask are: Which groups and institutions are they targeting? In what ways are they trying to hurt their targets? And what is their vision for what they want to country and world to look like when they’re all done?
This is why the smart analysts so often point to the historical experience of other countries which have gone through such painful convulsions. And lately, the MAGA project is increasingly reminding me of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution – the period of officially sanctioned violence and insanity that devastated China in the sixties.
China’s Cultural Revolution followed Mao’s disastrous command and control economic experiment in the 1950s known as the Great Leap Forward, which killed 20 million people. In the wake of that calamity, others in the Communist leadership sought to introduce economic reforms which went against the grain of Marxist orthodoxy. Both to swat down such heresy and to hurt his rivals, Mao simultaneously made his own appeal more cult-like while seeking to incite a new kind of revolution among Chinese society.
Think about it – most leaders seek to make their societies more stable, certainly not less so. To some extent, Mao may be seen as nostalgically seeking to take China back to the “good old days” of his regime’s founding revolution – looking to rekindle his followers’ energy, enthusiasm and ideological purity in the interest of renewing his rule. Call it: Make Communist China Great Again!
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The concept of a regime inciting “revolution” from above is in fact rare in history – and incredibly dangerous in how it combines state power, through such tools as the police and propaganda organs, with pure mob chaos. It’s most associated with totalitarian regimes whose obsessive lust for total power leads them to throw their societies continually off balance so that the regime may control people through terror and fear.
We got a strong taste of this energy on January 6th, 2021. Today, we are seeing the long-term rollout of a homegrown Cultural Revolution by a government that considers itself untouchable, under a leader who seems to care less and less about typical democratic motivators like opinion polls, the stock market and his party’s electoral prospects.
Unlike every other president’s efforts to impact society through governmental policy, the MAGA mission is to directly and radically change what political scientists call “civil society” by using government power as a blunt weapon against what Maoists call “class enemies”. Where other administrations strategically used regulation, funding, the bully pulpit and other tools to advance their goals, this one uses such cudgels as cancelling billions of dollars of grants or imposing executive orders aimed directly at particular organizations to hobble and intimidate an intellectual class they don’t trust.
This is radicalism such as we have never seen before in the American context. The word “radical” comes from the Latin word for root, and the MAGA Republican revolution clearly seeks to pull up American culture by its roots in order to replace it with something frighteningly different. Among the right wing Christian nationalists who rabidly support Trump, there is a movement called the Seven Mountains Mandate, which seeks to not simply change government policies but reset seven fundamental pillars of society, specifically:
1. Family
2. Religion
3. Education
4. Media
5. Arts and Entertainment
6. Business
7. Government
Altogether, this is the most ambitious effort to transform American society since that of the hippies and other lefty cultural pioneers of the 1960s. It’s important to understand how the MAGA movement is specifically targeting each of these “mountains”, and why.
The focus on arts and entertainment is noteworthy, calling to mind past totalitarian attempts to crush artists who don’t toe the line while promoting arts with propaganda value to the regime. Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing was notorious during China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s for commissioning operas, ballets, paintings, etc. that lionized Mao as a godlike figure while reinforcing the key themes of Communist propaganda.
Today, the US equivalent that we have are AI images on social media portraying Trump as an action hero, replacing his flab with rippling, Rambo-like muscles and books that just as absurdly attempt to rebrand this notorious liar, con man and womanizer as some sort of Christian savior. And Trump’s high-profile efforts to exert control over the Kennedy Center, Smithsonian, US Agency for Global Media, etc. raise the prospect of a new propaganda onslaught. Will we be subjected to cringe-worthy ballets replacing Madame Mao’s attacks on the bourgeoisie with an increasingly literal demonization of the “woke” cultural elite?
The focus on tearing down America’s great educational institutions is equally significant. Please don’t insult the Jewish people by giving credence to the notion that Trump’s crackdown on universities like Harvard and Columbia has anything whatsoever to do with “antisemitism.” The effort to cancel billions of dollars in grants to Harvard and other institutions, imperiling lifesaving research and other cutting edge work that keeps America competitive, is clearly aimed at bringing the educational establishment to heel while recklessly weakening it. Simultaneous campaigns to slash research funding from NIH and other sources and eliminate the Department of Education lean in the same direction.
The Trump regime’s indiscriminate mass purge of federal workers also clearly reveals, in its style and rhetoric, the nature of a campaign against a despised class of people to be scapegoated — as opposed to any sort of “reform” in the name of “government efficiency”.
Indeed, it was Elon Musk’s tweet about the need to “shift people from low to negative productivity jobs in government to high productivity jobs in manufacturing (as well as mining and refining of materials)” that most reminded me of Mao’s infamous campaign to send huge numbers of intellectuals to the countryside to be “re-educated” by working in farms and factories. Indeed, all the right-wing nonsense about “woke” (whatever the hell that word is supposed to mean at this point), does seem to be about re-educating intellectuals to never again challenge anything or anyone Republicans deem untouchable.
It is true that in this discussion, I’ve focused more on Trump’s Mao-like war on the progressive, educated class than on his Hitler-like war on the disadvantaged, from immigrant roundups to Medicaid cuts. But they tie all their class enemies, from the top of society to the bottom, together via conspiracy theories like The Great Replacement, under which supposedly “bad” Jews (not to be confused with the “good” ones who kiss Trump’s ass) bring in non-white immigrants to “poison the blood of the country” in Trump’s disgustedly Hitlerian phraseology.
The truth is that the MAGA Cultural Revolution is directly threatening millions of people in this country, taking away funding, jobs, and access to all kinds of services and opportunities. The silver lining to this chaos is the rapidly multiplying number of Americans with good reason to be very mad at this regime. If we can unite them in a well led and well planned resistance, we are likely to prevail.
But great damage is being done right now by these culture warriors and we need to have plans at the ready to fix their messes every chance we get. American society is being ripped apart in a purposeful way we have not seen before. We must therefore begin our work to stitch it back together – better than before – so that America does not become a permanently damaged society with our progress reversed by decades.
It’s not yet too late but America’s totalitarian moment is underway and threatening the advancements we have made over the past 250 years. Stand up now or prepare to be ground mercilessly under the wheels of this evil machine.
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