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maga extremists
Resisting Trump and Musk’s Cultural Revolution
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.”
Feb 22, 2025
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 14th 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 and 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 6 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 2 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.
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Think Trump's Tyranny Can't Be Opposed or Stopped? Think Again
The MAGA movement will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying.
Jan 29, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters now control the presidency; the Congress; the administrative agencies of the federal government; the Supreme Court; and the U.S. military, intelligence, and security apparatus. He will be able to call on support from a wide swath of the public and from a cadre of armed vigilantes and groups organized for violence and intimidation. He dominates much of the media and is in a position to intimidate much of the rest. He has the support of a large sector of corporations and the wealthy. He has a demonstrated willingness and ability to use not just the legal instruments of government but also violence and intimidation, criminal methods, and coups. The official opposition to him within the electoral arena is in many cases weak, feckless, and discredited. So how is it possible that his domination can ever be overcome?
There is a movement emerging in response to the MAGA threat. But is it even possible for this emerging movement to develop the power it will need to counter a Trump tyranny?
Gandhi once wrote, “Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.” A Trump tyranny will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying. It will only be able to pursue its destructive course if they enable or acquiesce in it. A movement can overcome the most powerful regime if it can withdraw that cooperation.
Social Self-Defense means defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from injustice and to defend our common interest as people—as members of society.
But how can that power be concretely realized? There are several ways that resistance to Trump’s MAGA regime can exercise significant power:
- Constituent power: the ability of a mobilized electorate to influence leaders whose own power depends on election.
- Protest power: the ability of masses of people to demonstrate the large numbers and willingness to act of those who share their views.
- Disruptive power: the ability to exact costs on powerful institutions by disrupting their functioning through civil disobedience, strikes, and other forms of direct action.
- People power: the mobilization of an entire society to withdraw support from a regime in order to bring it to an end through a nonviolent uprising or “social strike.”
There are no guarantees that such power can be mobilized in a way that will contain the Trumpian onslaught, let alone bring it to an end. Trump and his coterie appear to be committed to permanent rule by their followers and their ideology. To accomplish that they need to destroy all possible barriers to their domination. They must break down the institutions of democracy that might stand in their way, for example by restricting the right to vote. They need to eviscerate the institutions of law, medicine, civil service, journalism, and other relatively independent bases of potential opposition. They have to prevent economic actors, including corporations and unions, from pursuing their own self-interest rather than conforming to the regime’s demands. They need to intimidate and silence those who might expose their lies and abuses. They must demolish political obstacles, not only from the Democratic Party, but within the Republican Party as well. They need to paralyze the population with fear and entice it with the promise of a better life, or at least with bread and circuses.
While this program for MAGA domination promises enormous power, it also poses enormous vulnerabilities for its perpetrators. By making almost every individual and constituency a potential victim of its onslaught, it is also likely to generate a vast, diverse, and potentially unified opposition. Its program is an attack not just on one or another group, but on society as a whole—on the very practices and relationships that allow us to live together in a peaceful and constructive way. They are undermining the foundations of a free and ordered society. They are dismantling the basic practices that make life something other than a war of all against all. And they are hell-bent on destroying the natural conditions on which our life on Earth depends.
The MAGA regime threatens immigrants, African Americans, Muslims, workers, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people, all who depend on government for their health and well-being, and the environment on which we all depend for our very existence. Indeed, it threatens all that holds us together as a society. The resistance to that onslaught is therefore not just the defense of one or another group, but a defense of society, indeed of the very possibility of society. We the people—society—need to defend ourselves against this threat and bring it to an end. We need what resisters to authoritarian regimes elsewhere have called “Social Self-Defense.”
The term “Social Self-Defense” is borrowed from the struggle against the authoritarian regime in Poland 40 years ago. In the midst of harsh repression, Polish activists formed a loose network to provide financial, legal, medical, and other help to people who had been persecuted by the police or unjustly dismissed from their work. Calling themselves the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), they aimed to fight “political, religious, and ideological persecution”; to “oppose breaches of the law”; to “provide help for the persecuted”; to “safeguard civil liberties”; and to defend “human and civil rights.” KOR organized free trade unions to defend the rights of workers and citizens. Its members, who insisted on operating openly in public, were soon blacklisted, beaten, and imprisoned. They nonetheless persisted, and nurtured many of the networks, strategies, and ideas that came to fruition in the gigantic Solidarity union—and ultimately in the dissolution of repressive regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Social Self-Defense is the protection of that which makes our life together on Earth possible. It includes the protection of the human rights of all people; protection of the conditions of our Earth and its climate that make human life on Earth possible; the constitutional principle that government must be accountable to law; and global cooperation to provide a secure future for people and planet.
The individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as the targets that agenda threatens.
In the face of MAGA assault, protecting individuals, groups, and society as a whole go hand in hand. The attacks on individuals and groups are a threat not only to those directly targeted, but to our ability to live together in our communities, our country, and our world. It is a threat to all of us as members of society. Protecting those specific constituencies who are most threatened is essential for protecting our common interests as people. Social Self-Defense means defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from injustice and to defend our common interest as people—as members of society. Social Self-Defense means we’ve got each other’s backs.
Historians emphasize that there were great political divisions among the KOR activists who first developed the idea of Social Self-Defense. But they were able to act together around the agenda of resisting the Polish regime’s attacks on workers and society as a whole. The individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as the targets that agenda threatens. Trump and his supporters have the potential capacity to play them off against each other and to make deals with them one by one. There will be enormous pressures on advocacy organizations, movements, parties, and even activists themselves to sell each other out.
Social Self-Defense is a means to unify ourselves around mutual aid and around our common interests. It defines Trumpism not only as a series of separate threats to different sectors, constituencies, and policy agendas, but also as a unified—and therefore unifying—common threat. It allows us to use each action and campaign against one or another Trumpite abuse as a way to strike a blow against the MAGA project as a whole. Social Self-Defense does not annul but does transcend the rivalries of Democrats vs. Republicans and of Left vs. Right. It is a frame that can help unify those who should be acting in common to overcome the MAGA juggernaut.
This is the first of a series of Strike! Commentaries on social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut. It originally appeared on the Labor Network for Sustainability website on January 21, 2025.
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Don't Wait for Trump's Attack, People. It's Time to Go on Offense
Trumpy Dumpty is thin on the facts, policies and programs, but he is as cunning as a hungry shark in detecting weakness in his opponents, especially the Democratic Party.
Dec 14, 2024
Now is the time to prepare anticipatory strategies against what the vengeful, avaricious, lawless Trump and his Trumpsters have boasted out loud about daily. Don’t wait until Trump’s inauguration. A short list of suggestions follows:
- The civil servants and their unions better organize a personal presentation to their new bosses, most of whom are ignorant about the agencies they head other than to want to dismantle or enfeeble them. Be proactive or you will be always playing defense.
- Daring peaceful resisters in marches and rallies, beware of infiltrating provocateurs promoting violence. If you’re engaging in non-violent, civil disobedience, beware that Trump can’t wait to call you “terrorists” and use unbridled police power for arrests and prosecutions demanding long sentences.
- Trump and the Trumpsters, with his militias in waiting, as on the border, will contrive a phony threat from what they will label domestic “terrorists” to pulverize or intimidate their opponents. Trump thrived on the MAGA extremists and will give them “red meat,” if only to keep them occupied and loyal. They will demand action based on Trump’s wild campaign rhetoric.
- Being a convicted criminal himself, Trump will take federal cops off the corporate crime beat, reduce taxes on the wealthy and giant companies, ignore climate violence, add more bloat to the wasteful military budget, and increase pandemic threats with fake dismissals of looming perils. Don’t count on the business guys. They don’t like daily chaos, disruption and uncertainty that goes with Trump’s insatiable daily ego that must be fed constantly, but most CEOs won’t criticize Trump.
- Trump fears the Israeli lobby and their genocidal leader Netanyahu. His first term proved that in spades. Now he’ll back whatever Netanyahu, the Israeli war criminal, does. Annexing the West Bank, demanding more billions from American taxpayers to continuing the bombing, killing and pillaging in the Middle East region is just the tip of the iceberg.
- Lastly, Trump will drive a level of White House dictatorial lawlessness never before seen. His rhetoric and record strengthen this prediction. Remember his July 2019 declaration “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President.” He acted on that all the time. (See prior columns at nader.org and also read “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and Ralph Nader).
The anticipatory strategies here must be diverse, covering all three branches of government, and vectored toward the GOP. The citizen groups may have to work weekends, alongside the labor unions hated by Trump.
Trumpy Dumpty is thin on the facts, policies and programs, but he is as cunning as a hungry shark in detecting weakness in his opponents, especially the Democratic Party. Attached is a fable I wrote in 2022 that portrays how he might think about the Party of the Donkey. Given what happened up to and on November 5, 2024, it’s still useful to read today.
What Could Donald Trump Be Thinking About the Democratic Party?
October 21, 2022
Imagine Donald Trump dining with two of his supposed political advisers. Being an advisor to Donald means you soak up Donald’s political comments and feed them back to him. At this dinner, Donald was spouting off about the Democratic Party.
“Hey guys, know why the GOP is ahead in the polls?” “Why?” the two advisors replied in unison. Donald responded, “Because the Democrats are busy losing all by themselves, backtracking out of fear. Fearing a Party they are supposed to be fighting is what I call ‘beating themselves.’”
“Tell us more,” urged the two advisers.
“The Democrats are beyond stupido. They’ve contracted out their campaigns to consultants who, with their loyalties to their other corporate clients, have sold the Dems a strategy of caution – otherwise known as cutting off your cajones. Candidates without balls can’t think for themselves and just follow the script. Lots of Dems don’t want to appear with Bernie Sanders – the one guy I didn’t want to debate – who gets huge votes in conservative Vermont. What chickens!”
“This is all so beautiful, so gorgeous for us. Dems without balls means they campaign every day with their political antennae flailing, afraid they’ll say the politically incorrect phrase and upset the word police or deviate from their consultant’s finger-waving “no-no’s” if they want to rake in big money.”
“Imagine me contracting out my run to a consultant. ‘Donald, say this, don’t do that, do this, don’t say that.’ And paying them big bucks. Never! My people want the unfiltered Donald. That’s why they turn out in standing-room-only droves compared to the empty-seat Dems.”
Adviser #1 pipes up: “And the NY Times reports that the Dems are so afraid of our blaming them for inflation that they’ve shut up on their most popular ‘bread and butter’ positions, like freedom for women, health and safety for kids, good jobs and pay for more workers, increasing Social Security benefits. You know ‘bleeding heart stuff.’”
“Stupido Fabuloso!” Trump sneered, almost choking on his sirloin steak. “They don’t know who they are or worse who they WERE! FDR clobbered the Republicans with Social Security, minimum wage, and unemployment compensation, and he pushed for unions, taxed the rich and went after business crooks. He taunted the GOP. They called him a ‘traitor to his class,’ and he said he welcomed their hatred.”
“These issues are still very popular today, but the Dems aren’t pulling their base. The idiots even let me take the word ‘populist’ from their shaky hands – me the very core of Big Business.”
“They’ve mostly gagged themselves, leaving poor little Joe Biden alone talking about his infrastructure/jobs projects. Some Dems are so cowardly they don’t want to be seen campaigning with Delaware Joe.”
Adviser #2: “The Dems don’t learn from The Trumper. In politics, you got to boast. Politics is fatal for wimps.”
Trump cupped his mouth adding – “Jeez, I boast about things that aren’t even true, just like my casino ads. The Dems aren’t puffing about what is true. On paper, they support FDR’s New Deal updated to give everyone health insurance and voting rights for everyone, even felons. But where it counts – on the road, they’re in a driverless car. Ha, ha, ha – see? They’re beating themselves.”
“Because we are with the Winners, we’re against all the ‘communist’ things the masses drool over. And we are still winning. Why? Because we are masters at controlling what the media wants to cover – outrageous charges, flagrant behavior and all kinds of red meat the profit-obsessed media barons can’t resist. I told them as much in 2016. Still, they bit. Hilarious.”
“The GOP has got the offensive down to a science. Driving Dems nuts with ‘critical race theory’ (what’s that anyway?), ‘defunding the police’ (hah, we’ve defunded the federal regulator cops big time), ‘open borders,’ ‘radical judges,’ ‘over-regulation,’ ‘high taxes,’ ‘socialism’ – these are short enraging words that stick with our people. Like deer in the headlights, the Dems freeze, mumble and fret. Remember our old mentor Lee Atwater who said ‘When you’re explaining, you’re losing.’”
Adviser #1: “The big hole the Dems dug came long ago when they wrote off half the country as being too conservative and stopped spending money on their candidates in red districts. They don’t have the energy we have – look at how we’ve beaten them in the gerrymandering fights. It’s the energy gap. Remember 2009-2010?”
Trump broke in: “David, don’t get carried away. The biggest thing was their stupidity. Dems would spend more on a single Pennsylvania Senate seat than on six Senate seats combined in the Mountain states. Those states used to have Democratic Senators. Now GOP dominates there. Year after year, they don’t listen. I don’t listen either, to be frank. But I’m a very stable genius, while they are, as New Yorkers say, ‘Tone deaf.’”
Adviser #2: “Also the Republicans listen to their outside allies. Like Heritage, Cato, and Norquist. The Dems lean on their control-freak consultants and give progressive groups the cold shoulder. I have a progressive friend who tells me horror stories. She just gave me a copy of a blockbuster collection of very practical ways – down to the rebuttals and slogans – the Dems can use to landslide us in November. I started sweating until she told me most of the Dems are not rushing to use it. Most don’t even know about the two dozen citizen leaders who put it together, edited down to fiercely powerful persuasions by wordsmith Mark Green – a long-time Dem from New York City. It’s available to the world on winningamerica.net, but Green is confident that we will never pick it up.”
Trump: “Hmm, Winning America? – Nice ring to it. This fellow Green. I remember meeting him at a fundraiser when he was running for Mayor twenty years ago. He was all business, no small talk. He scared me then.”
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