Waiters And Gardeners -- Tom Sullivan

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/05/28/waiters-and-gardeners/

MAGA’s medieval dream

Drew Pavlou’s Iceberg Journal considered back in April how Chairman Mao’s crackpot war on “the humble Eurasian tree sparrow” resulted in a famine that “killed at least 40 million people in a disaster of world-historic proportions.”

Donald Trump’s cult is a kind of MAGA Maoism, Pavlou suggests:

Like Chairman Mao, President Donald Trump subscribes to a wide range of bizarre crackpot theories about economics, politics and world affairs. And like the Great Helmsman, he too has managed to concentrate an extraordinary amount of power in his hands, building up an immense personality cult so as to terrify other figures in his party into submission.

Pavlou argues:

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.’’

His conclusion:

These people have nothing in common with the civilisation they claim to speak for. They demand America abolish its 250 year old Constitution, abolish its liberal democratic heritage, so that the government can run Latin American tin pot dictatorship style paramilitary death squads.

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.

Yes, but that’s mostly the plebs. The rich elite backing Trump want a kind of neofeudalism. I wrote over a year ago that Democrats want an American economy that serves you. Republicans want an America in which you serve the economy.

. . .