MAGA Maoism

“What exactly do these theories posit? Drawing deep from the wellsprings of Trump’s bleak and nihilistic mind, Trump’s unified grand theory of economics essentially holds that the very concept of voluntary economic exchange is impossible: every transaction must have a winner and a ‘sucker.’”

“Honestly, the right way to think about MAGA is through the lens of Maoism and other Third Worldist political movements and personality cults. It uniquely draws upon the dumbest, shittiest and most repulsive parts of each: Peron’s economic illiteracy; Mao’s ideological wars on reality; Juche’s exaltation of economic pain and hardship in service of national self-reliance; Idi Amin’s ethnic expulsions of minority groups.

I believe that the central motivating force behind the movement is a rejection of the Enlightenment and liberal modernity. In place of reason it exalts superstition, magical thinking and primitive suspicion of anything beyond direct experience. It is the ideology of the medieval peasant, the goat herder, the cab driver who blames all world problems on the Jews. Its motivating essence is simple: ‘”Burn anything I can’t understand.’”

“We’d rather feed on grass than betray the principles of Marxism–Leninism!” – Slogan in Hoxhaist Albania during a time of mass starvation

“Batya and Trump simply wish to forge a new proletarian consciousness in the American worker, you see.

Batya’s arguments about a ‘spiritual’ dimension to Trump’s tariff policy in fact reminded me of the messianic fervour communicated by young Trump acolytes in Mana Afsari’s recent essay on the Trump movement.”

“Trump supporters take this Gospel teaching and apply it to the MAGA movement. They are willing to endure any hardship and sacrifice everything – family, nation, material comfort, possibly even their own lives – for the sake of Trump’s brain dead tariff plan which in turn relies upon a brain dead ChatGPT tariff formula that doesn’t even make mathematical sense. You will own nothing and be happy!

Timothy Snyder recently diagnosed this millenarian, almost apocalyptic tendency within the MAGA movement: ‘That’s the point that you can’t actually justify any of this in terms of a conventional account of the interest of the United States. I think what is going on instead is a logic of sacrifice, of making things worse, which at its depth, it comes down to hero worship.’”

“This is MAGA Maoism. They hate everything good about Western civilisation: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, rule of law, presumption of innocence, trial by peers. They want death squads and struggle sessions against political enemies because they want to make America a Third World country.

They are going to fail, but my God they will inflict an insane and psychotic amount of destruction and suffering in the process.”