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It was framed as a purge of “counter-revolutionary” elements, but at its core, it was a campaign to reassert Mao’s authority by turning the population, especially the youth, against the country’s own institutions, intellectuals, and even families.
Millions of students became Red Guards, emboldened by Mao’s rhetoric to dismantle the old world. Schools shut down, libraries were burned, and educators were beaten in the streets. Temples, artworks, and ancient traditions were destroyed in the name of ideological purity.
The upheaval lasted a decade and led to the persecution of millions, the death of hundreds of thousands, and the psychological trauma of a generation. In the short term, it left China culturally and economically paralyzed. In the long term, it created a vacuum where trust in knowledge, civility, and progress had been deliberately destroyed.
It would take decades for China to repair even a fraction of the damage, and some consequences, such as its demographic collapse from later policies like the One Child Rule, were seeded in that same era of authoritarian absolutism.
Fifty years later, in the United States of 2015, Trump accelerated the simmering Culture War created by Republicans in a similar fashion.
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Under Trump, America abandoned not just institutions but ideals. Loyalty to the Constitution became conditional, subordinated to a total allegiance to Trump. Religion became a political tool, hollowed of compassion and reduced to performative wrath.
Education was vilified. Science was mocked. Bureaucrats were demonized. The judiciary was packed, not for fairness but for toxic ideological gain. And every setback, including pandemics, protests, and lost elections, became fuel for conspiracies, each more fantastical than the last.
Much like Mao’s Red Guards, fanatical MAGA loyalists turned against their neighbors, their teachers, and their cities. Facts became “fake news.” An alternative history was rewritten in real time, changing the obvious narrative of what people witnessed with their own eyes.
Paranoia supplanted patriotism. And a cult of personality emerged, not by accident, but as the core mechanism of control. In Trump, millions saw not a leader, but a messiah. He was a flawed, erratic, and cruel little man, but he was theirs.
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In Mao’s case, the revolution became indistinguishable from the man. His image adorned every wall, his quotations were sacred text, and to question his authority was to reject the very identity of the new China. People starved, struggled, and suffered, but they still chanted his name.
Trump’s MAGA cult may not involve Little Red Books, but it carries the same fanaticism. For millions of Americans, no crime is too egregious, no lie too big, no failure too obvious to shake their faith.
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Where Mao promised revolution, Trump promises revenge. And like all personality cults, the truth is irrelevant. Only belief remains.
What the Cultural Revolution did to China is a warning, not a historical footnote. Even long after Mao’s death, the emotional scars, broken families, and lost knowledge continued to haunt the nation. In the U.S., even if Trump were removed from power today, the legacy of Trumpism and its anti-intellectualism, authoritarian yearning, and contempt for civic life has metastasized.
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Where does it end? If history is a guide, it does not end cleanly. It ends in exhaustion. China’s Cultural Revolution collapsed under the weight of its own extremism, but only after immeasurable damage. It took the better part of two generations for Chinese society to begin reconciling with what was lost. Trust in institutions. Respect for scholarship. Hope for a unified future.
For the United States, the cost is already mounting. A generation of children is growing up in classrooms stripped of accurate history, civics, and science. Climate change is dismissed. Gun violence is endemic. Health care remains broken. Economic inequality deepens. And the solution offered by MAGA is not reform but revenge against the educated, the diverse, the compassionate. Against the very idea of shared purpose.
What made the Cultural Revolution so destructive was not just Mao’s power. It was the willing participation of the people. Students who turned in their teachers. Neighbors who reported families. Millions who became perpetrators of a system they thought would elevate them.
The same pattern is emerging in the United States, but with even darker intent. China’s revolution was born out of desperation, a people broken by war, famine, and colonialism, yearning for justice, even if it was misdirected.
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Every rollback of rights, every act of state censorship, every stunt of political theater is done with pride because it hurts the perceived enemy. The victims, who are immigrants, LGBTQ people, the poor, the non-White, the non-Christian, are not collateral damage. They are the targets.
This is how cultural revolutions work. They are not about culture, they are about control. And they do not end when the leader falls. They end when the people stop believing the lie.
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