Are we in the midst of a cultural revolution?

Since the 1960s, the U.S. has become a more inclusive country.

This necessarily meant that white men lost some part of their privileged positions in education, employment and entertainment. By the 2000s, in the wake of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, anti-racism books were on the best sellers list, major corporations were examining their hiring and promotion policies, and educational institutions were beginning to address structural racism. 

The backlash has been intense. Using his “Project 2025” blueprint following his election, President Trump and company have been more than eager to rewind the clock to before the various civil rights movements, back even to before the Fourteenth Amendment that added “Birthright Citizenship” to the Constitution in 1868. The intensity of the administration’s attack on dominant values and structural elements of our society has convinced analysts and observers that its objective is to dramatically reshape our cultural norms—in fact to create a cultural revolution.

The term “Cultural Revolution” is most closely associated with China’s Proletarian revolution, spearheaded by Mao Zedong between 1966 and 1976, and Iran’s Cultural Revolution from 1980 to 1987—two radical movements that upended institutions, targeted intellectuals and reshaped society to fit ideological purity tests. These revolutions led to the purging of educators, the rewriting of history, and the persecution of those who refused to conform.

President Trump is currently involved in executing a cultural revolution as thoroughgoing in its ambitions and potential destructiveness as what Mao unleashed in China during the mid-1960s. During its revolution, China purged its intellectuals, universities were gutted, professors were publicly humiliated, research was shut down, and expertise was replaced with ideological loyalty. Similar patterns are emerging in the U.S.

 Although from a different ideological angle, we are beginning to observe a resurgence of ideological purges in education. Books are banned in dozens of states, from works on race and civil rights to literature about LGBTQ+ experiences. Universities are being defunded, and research grants are disappearing. Professors are targeted for their political beliefs. Teachers are being dismissed or intimidated for teaching so-called “divisive” subjects like systemic racism, gender studies and the history of oppression. Words like diversity, equity and climate change are erased from curricula. Entire academic fields are under attack for being “woke.” And the Department of Education is likely to be axed. Educators now face losing their jobs for acknowledging historical truths that some find uncomfortable. 

Federal employees have been directed to report colleagues engaged in D.E.I. initiatives, with warnings of “adverse consequences” for non-compliance. Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism and secularism, which, according to Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

 President Trump and his supporters borrowed some of their strategy from his good friend Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, who turned his country’s political system from being based on liberal principles into a patronage system run along illiberal lines, meaning a system where individual rights are no longer protected. 

Orban’s compliant legislature allowed him to concentrate power in the executive, deconstruct the Hungarian political system from the inside by stacking the courts, suppressing civil society and controlling right-wing media. The Trump administration is doing an admirable job emulating Orban’s “accomplishments.”

During China’s Proletarian Revolution between 1 and 2 million people lost their lives. 

We are certainly not there. However, many thousands have already unceremoniously lost their livelihood and we are only a little more than four months into this process. Sit tight!