Trump's Cultural Revolution

Trump: American Mao?

If you read the media these days you'll see a lot of articles comparing MAGA with the Chinese Cultural Revolution-- and Trump with Mao.

The trouble with this is that few people in the West understand what happened in the Cultural Revolution which is known in China as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The Western storyline has little to do with what actually happened –the whys and wherefores.

MAGA is in fact a “cultural revolution"too. But it is American culture -- so very different from Chinese culture--with different assumptions and different goals – and inevitably different consequences. A different kind of change is sought.

So, why the conflation?

Chaos creators

One reason, at least from an intellectual point of view, is “chaos” theory.

Mao believed that to create social and political change you had to break down or destroy social and political structures impeding grassroots innovation. After hopefully brief “destruction”—and a period of messy, convoluted chaos -- would come construction – and progress.

Trump has the same idea. Like Mao, he is on his last legs politically—he’s getting older. He says he wants to “drain the swamp”, the swamp being bureaucratic institutionalism, and hand things over to private contractors, driven by the profit motive.

Here Mao and Trump differ. Mao thought that people would do the “right” thing if freed from the profit motive! Mao did not have a “swamp” That said, just like Trump he did have entrenched interests he wanted to get rid of.

In addition, for both Mao and Trump, the ends justify the means. But Mao was an intellectual and idealist and Trump, a capitalist, who regards himself as a “doer” not a thinker. There is no “Trump Thought”.

Still, the Western media mix up everything , confusing the issues, which are obviously complex.

The Media sell.

One reason is the Media’s need to “sell” to the public. Their basic driver is profit, also, which means simplifying things for a public not accustomed to critical thinking.

I used to write TV commercials and a certain ad guru said to me: “Anything that cannot be said in 90 seconds should not be said at all. The human mind cannot understand more than one thought at a time.”. That was before Twitter and Tweets, before the concept of sound bites, before TV advertising made or broke political campaigns – before “change you can believe in”.

For the media, sneering about Trump’s Cultural Revolution is a way of calling him a crazy extremists, who appeals to the Mob, the “deplorables”.

Of course, it’s also racist – not in the old-fashioned way that that emphasized skin color but in the much more effective late 20^th and now 21^st Century way. Remember that 1985 song – "We Are the World"?

China is a large chunk of the world’s population, a huge multiethnic society — a world in itself. But not our world!

Ethnocentrism

The media typify American ethnocentrism – the US as the "melting pot" of every culture in the world each subsumed by some kind of indefinable, abstract, all-inclusive American identity— exceptional and other to all others.

“Otherness” is what racism is really about. The ultimate form of alienation.

The American media apply a kind of reductive logic to the Proletarian Cultural Revolution to simplify the whole thing and associate it with that “other” culture — China — different from our — but one which will not be human unless it can become American. They have a variation of this logic for Trump, the Orange Man, who is implicitly un-American.

Bad bad bad. Bad Mao. Bad Maoism.

Bad bad bad. Bad Trump.

Red pill? Blue pill?

In this not so brave New World, it aint either/ or.

A Little History

As I have indicated, the fundamental motivations and goals of Trump's “Cultural Revolution” is nothing like Mao’s were.

The decade long Chinese Cultural Revolution began in 1966, as a response to a call by Mao to renew the revolution, purging Chinese party elites. Mao was aware that he was aging and feared that elements within the Party, and the new Chinese Nomenklatura would undermine his reforms, stalling the liberation of the Chinese peasantry. He saw what was happening in Russia for one thing.

So he called out for the continuance of the socialist revolution, spearheaded mostly by students –and (supposedly) directed by the “Gang of Four”, led by Mao’s wife.

I say "supposedly" because the chaos of the times makes it difficult to know exactly who did what and why and when and how and how much – all of which is still a matter of debate in China.

For the West all this is cut and dried and mixed with other stuff in propaganda soup then fed to the public. Here’s the prestigious Britannica.

The revolution left many people dead (estimates range from 500,000 to 2,000,000), displaced millions of people, and completely disrupted the country’s economy.

Official numbers of the dead are under 35,000.

That’s typical of the historical distortions and mental garbage that litter the internet.

The Cultural Revolution did a lot of damage – and some good, too. It’s not black and white unless you are a Chinese defecting to the West and trying to fit in — or an American “journalist” trying to get ahead.

The excellent Godfree Roberts writes:

By 1966, the Communist Party had been in power for sixteen years but, behind its successes lurked a guilty secret: eighty percent of rural Chinese remained semi-destitute, illiterate, without access to basic needs, education or medical care. The Revolution had changed little beyond ownership of their tiny plots, which remained subject to the vicissitudes of weather and fortune. As Chungwu Kung observed, “China was a people’s democratic dictatorship in theory only; in practice, political and cultural power was held by scholarly and bureaucratic intellectuals who commanded vast influence and prestige”.

Mao proposed giving five hundred million peasants equality, democracy, justice and dignity. He would direct their frustration ‘outward, through the force of ideology expressed in a political slogan, breaking the shackles of repression through study and converting their thought into creative action’. One Spring morning in 1966 he told startled colleagues, “I firmly believe that a few months of chaos, luan, will be mostly for the good,” and so became the only national leader in history to overthrow his own government.

Roberts’ accounts of the Cultural Revolution provide a sorely needed perspective – that the Cultural Revolution, while disruptive and chaotic and punctuated by abuses and violence, resulted in significant reforms setting the stage for later progress, essentially enfranchising factory workers and peasantry.

Mao’s approach enfranchised the peasantry and factory workers those below– and was quite different from Trump’s current “cultural revolution” which seeks to disenfranchise those at the bottom, while increasing the power of their techno-feudal overlords the top

“Mao Thought” emphasized simple changes and practical social programs that made sense to people without anything. Basic education. Basic healthcare, that kind of thing. But most of these things would not be realized more fully until Xi Jinping.

By contrast, Trump and Musk are firing staff in an already understaffed bureaucracy and cutting any programs that can be contracted out to private contractors, or in the case of USAID and NED, reconstituted under the NSA and CIA, without philanthropic bells and whistles. Their emphasis is on immediate profit, which means also cutting funding for research, which does not have immediate application, especially in the areas of healthcare and biological research and pure science in a wide range of areas, and, of course, anything that cannot be patented and sold.

The public interest is not important - only commercial interest.

Yet, much of Musk’s wealth –also Tesla and Space X – comes from exploitation of government funded programs—a total of $38 billion. His accomplishments depend on a lot of pure public sector research .

Cutting income taxes benefits the rich most of all, as do tariffs. This is a revolution of, for, and by techno feudal elites.

For the record, I am at the poverty line and pay 15% tax. Please Elon lend me a million for a cup of coffee

The irony is that MAGA thinking, which is not really “thinking” is dystopian. In the dystopian future, which may be closer than you think, we may have a different kind of Cultural Revolution— more like the French one of yore and gore.

Whose head do you want to go first? Let’s do a poll.

Special Article

In my research on leadership, I looked at both Putin and Xi. In both cases, they came to power as the result of massive social changes. For Putin it was the collapse of the USSR and post-Soviet kleptocracy. For Xi, it was working in a village during the Cultural Revolution. They struggled. Their societies struggled. Mao was at least partly right about the need to challenge habits of thought.

Without struggle, no progress and no result. Every breaking of habit produces a change in the machine.

G. I. Gurdjieff

A pity Trump never had to struggle,

Coming soon….The next special article on Putin is still being revised and rewritten and re-researched. I hope you will find it worthwhile.

Gurdjieff also wrote

Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively.

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