Make America Maoist Asap

medium120350148A cultural revolution is underway in America. It’s not yet clear how similar it is to Mao Zedong’s decade-long chaos-inducing mass mobilisation movement in China, the most famous cultural revolution in modern history.But there are some parallels between Trump’s America and Mao’s cultural revolution, which will be 60 next year. Some are calling it MAGA Maoism, which can be summed up in three nicely alliterative words: badge, bureaucracy, boldness. Badge of faith | Spotted on social media and around Washington, DC is Brendan Carr’s ‘Mao pin’, the golden lapel badge bearing Trump’s profile. Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has himself posted photos in which he wears the badge.The Trump profile on the pin looks like one of the designs on a Mao badge that became popular after the Chinese Communist Party chairman launched his cultural revolution. While there were many different iterations of Mao’s visage on items of different shapes and materials, it was the cultural revolution that made the Mao badge a crucial loyalty symbol. It was worn, like Carr’s pin, on the left side of the chest, just above the heart.White House has dismissed rumours that the Trump cabinet, Republican lawmakers and other MAGA supporters are required to wear these pins, even as it made this bombastic claim: “If they choose to wear one, it is to show support for the greatest president in history.”Despite the showiness of the lapel pin, the Mao badge was always considered less of a badge of faith than the Little Red Book of the great man’s sayings. Will the God Bless the USA Bible, known as the Trump Bible, become the equivalent in America? The book, first published in 2021, features the handwritten chorus to an eponymous song by Lee Greenwood, a Grammy award-winning country music star who is Trump’s friend and business partner. It also has significant documents about the founding of America such as its Constitution, bill of rights and the declaration of independence.Already, there are signs that the Trump Bible may be achieving higher status than Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal. Two bible versions that specifically commemorate Trump’s presidential terms are sold out. A third version is titled The Day God Intervened to mark the failed assassination attempt on Trump in July 2024.Breaking the bureaucracy | Trump has empowered his billionaire collaborator Elon Musk to harness the informally constituted but official-sounding Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to dismantle the state and fire its functionaries. With the head of the White House budget office issuing a memo that describes the federal bureaucracy as “bloated” and “corrupt”, it is in the firing line and the footsoldiers in this particular war are Musk’s young aides, several of them aged between 19 and 24.The DOGE kids seem to have knowledge of engineering and IT but not public administration and policy. But they have helped Trump make deep cuts to thousands of programmes, fire tens of thousands of civil servants, dismantle USAID and target govt agencies such as the one that supports America’s 123,000 libraries and 35,000 museums.It feels like the 21st century version of the moment Mao turned to radical young students, some no older than 14, and gave them licence to denounce all authority, particularly the Four Olds — customs, culture, habits, ideas. The stated goal of Mao’s cultural revolution was to purge China of the “bourgeois power holders” and “capitalist roaders”, who he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology.But eventually, the young Red Guards as they were called, were used to purge any other centres of power and the rhetoric of the revolution became focused on “traitors”, “renegades”, “spies”. It culminated in a nationwide witch hunt for disloyal enemies. After this came a sweeping campaign supposedly against corruption, which cowed the people because almost every act or utterance became potentially criminal.There is a reason Frank Dikotter, a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China, begins his superb book The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History with the following quote from Mao: “Who are our friends? Who are our enemies?/ This is the main question of the revolution.”Trump administration’s assault on its perceived enemies is deep and wide. It extends to law firms that have represented political and business rivals. And Trump recently ordered an investigation into former US cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs for stating the 2020 presidential election was secure. “He’s the fraud,” Trump declared, “he’s a disgrace.” Bold big boss | There are other signs too of a culture being created in which one man remakes the state and rewires the way it thinks. In his war on “woke culture”, Trump is targeting some of the world’s best universities. He has taken over the Kennedy Center, one of America’s most prestigious arts institutions, and attacked the work it previously featured as that of “radical left lunatics”.Similarly, Mao took aim at literature and the arts, criticising the culture ministry for failing to curb the spread of revisionist ideas and suggesting it would be more appropriate to name it the “Ministry of Foreign Dead People” or “Ministry of Gifted Scholars and Beautiful Ladies”. He also questioned the very value of school and university education.As Mao said, “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery…A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”