Who offers more spectacle, DeSantis or Trump?
I studied Chinese history at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. Somewhere I have some artifacts from the period’s inescapable propaganda. Even without that background, it was clear without squinting where this column on “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution” by Tania Branigan would go by about one and a half sentences in (New York Times):
It would seem impossible to forget or minimize the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, resulted in an estimated 1.6 million to two million deaths and scarred a generation and its descendants. The movement, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership sought to purge Chinese society of all remaining non-Communist elements, upended nearly every hallowed institution and custom. Teachers and schools long held in esteem were denounced. Books were burned and banned, museums ransacked, private art collections destroyed. Intellectuals were tortured.
Subtle. Or maybe not. But I had not made the connection before to what political and religious extremists in this country fantasize of imposing: a cultural makeover “as totalizing in scope as the Cultural Revolution.”
Wrong-thinking bureaucrats purged. Racial minorities again bowing and scraping. Women internally exiled — barefoot, pregnant, and confined to domestic chores. Gender nonconformists forced back into the closets where they belong. The educated brought low and/or forcibly re-educated, the rest indoctinated in right-think. Non-Christian faiths tolerated so long as memberships remain low, inconspicuous and undemanding. And guns. Lots of guns.
It is harder to buy the comparison when the right rails about the horrors of intersectionality, but it shows I’m not the first to perceive an attempt to bring about a government-enforced, made-in-America cultural revolution.
When the Cultural Revolution comes up in American conversation, it’s generally in debates over the rise of group think and mob mentalities, performative outrage on Twitter and on college campuses. Parallels certainly exist: Political leaders fomenting cultural wars, polarization reducing differences of opinion to signifiers of ally and heretic, and the media resorting to shouty sloganeering over considered debate.
But Branigan’s book offers an equally important cautionary lesson: the perils of ignoring or distorting history. What a country downplays in its historical record continues to reverberate, whether it’s the Cultural Revolution in China or the treatment of Native Americans and the legacy of slavery in the United States. And just as Xi Jinping can censor China’s recent Covid record, so can America attempt to whitewash events — attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — in its own recent past.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has embarked on his own cultural revolution in Floriduh. There are book bans, purges of academics and wrong-thinking officials, whitewashing of history, efforts to bring capitalists to heel, and targeting of gender nonconformists. The usual. Just a taste of coming MAGA attractions. A visit to China, no passport required.
But DeSantis is as boring as hell. He is clueless enough that he thinks he can win the black hearts of white Christian nationalists ahead of the 2024 primaries merely by abusing people they hate. Donald Trump had a TV show. He has a reality TV family. He has his own jet and a skyscraper with TRUMP emblazoned on it. In gold. Trump may not have a little red book, but he has a cheering sea of red hats and “Trump or Death” tee shirts. He has flag teams in boats and pickup trucks. Can’t have a cultural revolution without spectacle, Rhonda.
