Trump’s Cultural Revolution

The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry

I’m in Lisbon, speaking at a conference the Banco de Portugal is holding to commemorate the revolution that brought democracy to Portugal 50 years ago. I worked at the Bank in 1976 and have been a friend of Portugal ever since. And while Portugal has faced many challenges since the Carnation Revolution, all in all its democracy has flourished.

Alas, democracy in my own nation is now under dire threat. So I thought I’d write a short post about that today. Probably another brief post tomorrow. Then my wife and I will be on a bike trip, with at most quick notes from the road.

Donald Trump has been treated very, very badly. At least that’s what he says all the time, and there’s no reason to doubt that it’s how he feels. Hardly a day goes by without an outburst like this:

Above all, he clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him.

And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it’s obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites — a group that, as they see it, doesn’t include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists and experts of any kind.

It took no time at all for the Trumpists to move from trying to purge government agencies of DEI to trying to control the content of medical journals.

Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.

If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

But wait, wasn’t Mao hard left while America has been taken over by the hard right? Well, why do you think there’s a big difference between the two? I’m a believer in horseshoe theory, which says that the extreme left and the extreme right are more like each other than either is like the political center. For example, among Britain’s unions there is a hard-left faction that has no counterpart in the United States. Some of its positions, notably making apologies for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, look a lot like MAGA.

And in America some leftist commentators have effectively become spokesmen for the tech-bro right.

Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.

The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.

There is, however, one big difference between Chairman Mao in 1966 and President Trump in 2025: Trump probably — probably — doesn’t have the cards.

Until a couple of weeks ago, as one institution after another capitulated to Trump’s demands, it was hard to avoid the sickening feeling that American civil society would fold without a fight. But as I said, Trump and his movement are driven by visceral urges, not strategy. And right now it looks as if they overreached. In different ways, the rendition of innocent people to gulags in El Salvador — don’t call it deportation — and the assault on Harvard seem to have stiffened spines. And the catastrophe of Trump’s economic policy has alienated businesspeople who would otherwise have served as his useful idiots.

America as we know it may yet perish. But at this point we seem to have a chance.

MUSICAL CODA