“If you take every asymmetric American advantage”—our universities, our science, our reputation for attracting the world’s smartest young people—“we’re going after each of them in a fit of cultural Maoism,” Doshi told me last week. Mao Zedong, who led China’s one-party state after World War II, oversaw a fraught and fatal attempt to industrialize the country, known as the Great Leap Forward. His regime was infamous for its cult of personality and its purging of ideological enemies, not to mention millions of deaths from starvation.
Doshi does not think that Trump will starve millions of Americans to death (nor do I). But he does see Trump’s second term featuring a “cult of personality,” he told me, which may not quite be Maoist but does feel Mao-ish. The first 100 days of this administration were “defined by the relentless targeting of individuals and organizations for their heretical views and purges within the administration for those deemed insufficiently loyal. And its destination is the destruction of state capacity and leading institutions as fervor and zeal overwhelm any prudence and planning.”
Doshi isn’t the only one making this analogy. Several weeks ago, the writer Rotimi Adeoye identified what he called “MAGA Maoism” in The Washington Post. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he said, the Trumpist right seems obsessed with scrubbing any vestige of progressive thought from government libraries and government-funded museums. As The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has written, the White House has yanked books by Black, female, and Jewish authors from the Naval Academy (while leaving Mein Kampf in place), accused the National Museum of African American History and Culture of spreading “improper ideology,” and urged the National Park Service to rewrite its history of the Underground Railroad.
Another eerie echo of Mao has been MAGA’s glorification of strong men doing strong things and its dreams of sending the liberal elites to the factories and the fields to teach them a lesson. In a commencement address at the University of Alabama, Trump encouraged business majors “to apply your great skills that you’ve learned … to forging the steel and pouring the concrete of new American factories, plants, shipyards, and even cities.” As the journalist Michael Moynihan observed, this sounded curiously like Mao’s suggestion in 1957 that “the intellectuals”—including “writers, artists, teachers, and scientific-research workers”—should “seize every opportunity to get close to the workers and peasants,” even if it meant living in rural China for several years to work as “technicians in factories” or “technical personnel in agriculture.”
For years, both major parties have looked to China with envy. How can they make so much, so quickly, while we struggle to build sufficient housing in major cities—much less advanced electronics, computer chips, robots, and ships? Under Trump, China envy has taken a strange turn. Rather than compete, we seem to be ceding the future to China while emulating its past—casually gutting the government’s ability to support science and key technologies while hunting down wrongthink with the same ferocity that Trump supporters once despised among progressives.
In the past week, the Mao vibes have gotten especially weird. In the 1950s and ’60s, Mao demanded that ordinary Chinese families sacrifice for the general good—for example, by melting their kitchen utensils and other metallic items to increase national steel production. (This mostly produced a lot of useless pig iron.) Trump, for his part, has become fixated on new methods of economic sacrifice. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,” he said, in defense of his tariffs’ likely effect of obliterating the toy business. Going further, he told NBC that students “don’t need to have 250 pencils, they can have five.” Just over 100 days into this term, what the Trump supporter Bill Ackman called “the most pro-growth, pro-business administration” in modern history is defending the rationing of Elsa dolls and No. 2 pencils.
Trump’s administration is still young, and it has an uncanny ability to pack each week with a year’s worth of news. Optimistically, there are many more weeks for Trump’s economic and cultural policy to get better. Realistically, there is plenty of time for both to get worse. By driving away talented immigrants, by targeting our most successful universities, by torching our trading alliances, by dismantling our industrial policy, by slashing our scientific funding, and by hurting America’s reputation around the world at the precise moment that we need global scale to build a secure counterpart to China’s industrial dominance, Trump has responded to the threat of China by mimicking the ghost of its past.
When I asked the Foreign Affairs co-author Kurt Campbell for his assessment of Trump, he told me that he has had alarming conversations with analysts in China. “Some of them will candidly say, ‘You know, we had our timetables for how we might come at you … for how we might pull [you] away [from] your allies,’” Campbell said. “‘And what you’re doing in three or four months exceeds what we would have hoped to do in five or 10 years.’” The ultimate accomplishment of American Maoism would be this: Our great leap backward would give China the global preeminence that Mao himself failed to achieve on his own.
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