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The Trump-Musk Cultural Revolution – OpEd

The aging leader wanted to shake up his country, so he launched a second revolution with the help of a cadre of young people. Drunk with power, the leader targeted his enemies, remade his political party, and turned his own government into a self-destructing circus. Anyone with real expertise was sent far away from the political center. Intellectuals of all kinds came under suspicion. And the young people who rose up in support of the aging leader ran roughshod through society. They might not seem to have a lot in common, Mao Zedong and Donald Trump. The Communist leader, having come to power through a revolutionary war, harbored a visceral hatred for capitalism. The American businessman shirked military service, won the presidency (twice) through democratic elections, and harbors a visceral hatred for communism. And yet, Trump is currently involved in a cultural revolution as thoroughgoing in its ambitions and potential destructiveness as what Mao unleashed in China in the mid-1960s. You Say You Want a Revolution? At one level, what Donald Trump and his minions are doing is regime change, as Anne Applebaum has argued. They aren’t reforming U.S. government. They are transforming its operating system, courtesy of Elon Musk and his inaptly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Regime change is certainly part of the Trump game plan. He has borrowed this strategy from Viktor Orban, who turned Hungary’s political system based on liberal principles into a patronage system run along illiberal lines. The Orban transformation relied on a compliant legislature that allowed him to concentrate power in the executive. Once a leading liberal, the Hungarian leader knew how to deconstruct the Hungarian political system from the inside by stacking the courts, suppressing civil society, and controlling a right-wing media. You’d think that regime change would be enough for Trump. He is a man of unpredictable utterances but rather constrained ambitions. He wants to punish his enemies, reward his friends, stay out of jail, and secure his financial and political legacy. Those around Trump, however, are pushing for something more extreme. They have cast him in the role of the Great Helmsman—Mao’s favorite moniker—who steers American society into turbulent, uncharted waters. Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” according to Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. By “left,” Roberts means anyone who follows the Constitution, acknowledges the importance of international law, and has a moral conscience. This more revolutionary program owes much to Chairman Mao who, in 1966, decided that Chinese society was so infected with various strains of reformism (capitalism, liberalism, traditionalism) that it, too, needed another revolution. On top of that, Mao unleashed the power of populism—the “masses” in the vernacular of that time and place—to eliminate his political enemies. “It was a power struggle waged… behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement,” writes Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans. In the 1950s, after the country’s first revolution, Chinese society remained fundamentally conservative. The economy was primarily agrarian and Confucianism was still strong, particularly in the countryside. China was also elitist, with a Communist leader like Zhou Enlai born into the mandarin class and Mao himself coming from wealthy landowning stock. The Communists didn’t just aspire to change China’s governance. They wanted to turn Chinese society into something considerably more urban, industrial, secular, literate, and egalitarian. The change would be violent, if necessary, because Mao believed that “revolution was not a dinner party” (one wonders if Kevin Roberts has a copy of the Little Red Book on his bedside table). At first, Mao relied on the Party and its repressive institutions to effect change. By the mid-1950s, he launched an effort at reform, the Thousand Flowers Campaign, that spiraled out of the Party’s control, which generated the backlash of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. That was, in turn, followed by the disastrous economic experiments of the Great Leap Forward. These whiplash changes in policy created considerable anxiety among the Chinese leadership that the Party, and the revolution more generally, was losing its hold over the population, which understandably didn’t know where to turn. Mao ultimately decided that only another revolution could break the country’s ties with its past. The agents of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were the Red Guards, teenagers who heeded Mao’s call for transformation by taking the law into their own hands. They attacked capitalist-roaders, “bourgeois” teachers, and ultimately each other. Chinese society descended into such chaos that some people even fled over the border into North Korea, which was seen as a place of relative sanity. That’s how violent, unpredictable, and apocalyptic China was during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted nearly a decade until Mao’s death in 1976. Trumpists have their counterpart to Mao’s desire for revolutionary transformation: a plan to destroy everything in the federal government except the royal presidency and the Pentagon, and privatize everything in the country that has a tinge of the public to it. The Trumpian equivalents of the Red Guards are a motley crew. There’s “Big Balls,” 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a DOGE-employed hacker who, among other questionable ventures, administers “an AI-powered Discord bot operating in Russia.” Then there’s 25-year-old Marco Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after the revelation of his racist tweets (but whom Musk has promised to rehire). The parallel with China is not precise, since there are plenty of non-teenagers who are involved in this insurrection, including the middle-aged January 6 rioter Peter Marocco, who is slated to head up USAID. Whatever their age, however, these Trumpists are true believers, enthusiastically feeding democracy into the woodchipper. Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past. Why Trumpians Take Culture Seriously The Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not just a response to some recent fad. They are, as in China, an effort to radically revamp the very culture. Since the 1960s, the United States has become a more inclusive country, which has necessarily meant that white men have lost some part of their privileged positions in education, employment, and entertainment. By the 2000s, the United States still had a long way to go, but in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racism books were on the best-seller list, major corporations were examining their hiring and promoting policies, and educational institutions were finally beginning to address structural racism. Cultural transformations always move two steps forward and one step backward. In this case, the backlash has been much more intense, with Trump and company eager to rewind the clock to before the various civil rights movements, back even before the Fourteenth Amendment that added birthright citizenship to the Constitution in 1868. The Trump administration has tried to impose gender categories that define the trans community out of existence. It is restricting abortion access at home and abroad, fulfilling the candidate’s promise to help women “whether they like it or not.” In the same way that Mao tried to make everything in China public—business, meals, child-rearing—Trump wants to privatize everything from schools to the post office. He is opening up government to conservative Christians, and religious institutions are poised to claw back as much public power as they can get. Mao thought that he was pushing with history’s tide. China’s current capitalist trajectory suggests otherwise, even though the regime change implemented by the Communist Party has remained more or less intact. The Party remains in charge, but the culture shows few enduring influences of the Cultural Revolution. With far-right politicians on the rise around the world, Trump and Musk similarly believe that they are on the cutting edge of change. But mass deportations and boosted birthrates among “tradwives” won’t prevent America from losing its white-majority status in about 20 years. DEI is no fad. It is an accurate reflection of demographics. And short of imposing totalitarian control and setting up concentration camps, the MAGA crowd won’t be able to alter this trajectory. Welcome Back to 2025 This is not the first time I’ve written about the parallels between Trump and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 2022, safely ensconced in the Biden era but plagued by nightmares of the future, I wrote an article entitled “The Terrifying World of 2025” for TomDispatch. It was/is a world of mass deportations, where “Social Security checks and Medicare benefits have been delayed because the federal bureaucracy has shrunk to near invisibility.” Here was my look into the future, which is now our present: On his first day in office, the president signaled his new policy by authorizing a memorial on the Capitol grounds to the “patriots” of January 6th and commissioning a statue of the QAnon shaman for the Rotunda. He then appointed people to his cabinet who not only lacked the expertise to manage their departments but were singularly devoted to destroying the bureaucracies beneath them, not to speak of the country itself. He put militia leaders in key Defense Department roles and similarly filled the courts with extremists more suited to playing reality-show judges than real life ones. In all of this, the president has been aided by a new crop of his very own legislators, men and women who know nothing about Congress and actively flouted its rules and traditions even as they made the MAGA caucus the dominant voting bloc. My piece focused on one part of this nightmare scenario—the dispatch of all newly unemployed federal employees, academics, and journalists to take the jobs vacated by deported immigrants. That has yet to take place, but Musk’s acquisition of all federal data could serve as the basis for a MAGA Corps of workers that fill the gaps in the private sector. The Trump team is currently stress-testing U.S. democracy to see where and how it breaks. Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s. Back in 2022, I was not optimistic in my crystal-ball-gazing: I know this nightmare won’t end overnight. China’s Cultural Revolution stretched on for nearly a decade and resulted in as many as two million dead. Our now-captive media doesn’t report on the growing violence in this country, but we’ve heard rumors about mobs attacking a courageous podcaster in Georgia and vigilantes targeting a lone abortion provider in Texas. Things might get a lot worse before they get better. Things could indeed get a lot worse. The mass deportations haven’t begun in earnest. The courts have hit pause on a number of Trump’s more egregious moves. The worst of the new Cabinet members—Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have yet to make their marks. But I’d like to believe that Trump and Musk, for all the power they currently deploy, are basically spitting into the wind. But it’s up to us, with every breath we take, to make sure that all that ugly spittle ends up back on the face of MAGA. This article was published by FPIF