Trump 2.0 comes roaring out of the gate

Boomers: Let that be your last battlefield

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It is with perverse pleasure that I witness the rapid-fire nominations coming out of Mar-a-Lago. Trump is laying down markers left and right (okay, only Right), staying true to his vision and his volatile cocktail of promises and threats.

But I have to say, my jaw is getting tired from dropping so violently — and so often.

I get Trump’s ambition and urgency: the man wants to leave his mark on the political system by recasting it comprehensively and he knows he likely only has months to accomplish this Trumpist Cultural Revolution in which opposing ideologue elites (deep-state types, “experts,” etc.) are duly punished/diminished/marginalized as true MAGA loyalists are embedded throughout. All this purging will be very familiar to anyone who’s studied the USSR, and the take-no-prisoner vibe is very Mao-like (Ask not what your leader can do for you but what you can do for your leader!).

My gut sense? If America was inevitably slated for this sort of regenerative/degenerative (your call) political transformation, then better to experience it full-bore than partially. Cards will fall where they may, china shops will be destroyed along with glass houses … you get the idea: let it all hang out in a Boomer-led reverse Sixties revolution that book-ends that generation’s time in the political spotlight.

Gotterdammerung, it is.

I feel pretty confident in predicting that this will be the last political act of the Boomers (Be sure to destroy the door on your way out!), so it is fitting that this ideological campaign seeks to erase all vestiges of the “anti-Americanism” (aka, “woke-ism”) that is perceived to have infiltrated and infected our entire society these past decades. Bad people and their bad thinking must be purged! With no punishment too severe for the Demon-crats who have, for so long, turned we true Americans away from our White Christian nationalist roots with its emphasis on firmly fixed gendered roles (women make babies, men choose when).

Finally, someone to deliver us all from the unholy reign of the transgenders — the bogey-them without peer!

How much can this Cultural Revolution achieve? We shall see.

Many Americans, I suspect, gave Trump a mandate to whip inflation now(!) and not much else. More likewise granted him a mandate to continue disengaging America from a troubled world and the “forever wars” it constantly suffers (all of which we instinctively view as “our fault” because … just because!).

Both such mandates have honorable-enough and logical-enough origins, per my notion that America must rebalance itself away from unlimited, world-spanning, market-making responsibilities and toward some re-embrace of a market-playing role that accepts the now-inescapably-evident and moving-toward-hypercompetitive multipolar world order as it is.

It’s just that Trump wants to magically re-negotiate (the trade-war/tariffs chimera) America back into the unparalleled world power of his youth — America’s fabled “golden age” of the 1950s. Naturally, with such a goal in mind, the “sins” of the Sixties must all be erased and American society re-set to those tried-and-true values encompassing various hierarchies not to be questioned (Whites lead, others follow; men rule, women nurture; Christianity reigns supreme, infidels be damned if not converted; and so on).

This is White Christian nationalism’s version of Native Americans’ “ghost dance” movement in the late 19th century: willing into being a lost past while unleashing, from on high, judgment of those responsible for its unjust destruction.

The Ghost Dance began in Nevada in 1869 with the Paiute people. The spiritual movement was a response to the US government and White settlers' pervasive conquest of Native American nations. The Ghost Dance was intended to restore Native American culture, including their lands, food, and way of life. The dance was believed to reunite the living with the spirits of the dead, who would then fight on the Native Americans' behalf. 

To me, that is pretty much what January 6 represented: a performative exhibition designed to trigger the much-longed for counter-revolution. It was entirely serious to its participants and entirely ludicrous to non-believers.

The personal pain driving that show of force was — and remains — very real. It simply cannot be solved in that manner. We cannot wish away multiculturalism across our sacred lands. We can performatively banish the most recent “invaders” of our lands — something previous generations of American immigrants have, throughout our nation’s history, readily embraced as a means to prove their Americanism (with the most recent ones being the most hardcore). But that won’t change much.

The reality is that Whites are losing their majority status within our union, as are Christians. The only way to stave off that inevitable outcome is to cut ourselves off from a world where we already find ourselves in a frightening minority— a fantastic goal we will now chase with this attempted MAGA Cultural Revolution.

But, of course, the reality of pursuing a fantasy is that you must truly believe, because the steps required are profoundly vicious. Mao was up for that challenge in 1960s China, as were portions of the rebellious Boomers here in America. Now, as they age out of the system, Boomers on the right want to correct that historical mistake — that detour from “proper” Americanism.

No, I don’t think it will succeed.

But the attempt, however extended it ends up being (two/four/more years) will accomplish one thing in spades: it will remove America from any remaining pretense of sole superpower standing in our world, and, since that is both inevitable and good, that is the slim value I spot in these proceedings.

All of Trump’s picks so far speak to this would-be Cultural Revolution’s focus on regrading the domestic landscape — in effect, restoring a more “natural order.” We won’t be using our military for anything overseas — if we can help it. Instead, we’ll purge its ranks of woke-ism and other ideological impurities and set it upon those Americans who just need to go! (starting, of course, with the illegals but spreading — who knows — how far beyond?).

So, if I am an ally or competitor or enemy of the US, I now see a huge window of opportunity opening up for me and mine to re-negotiate our standing in this post-American world of Trump’s making. In effect, and, as increasingly demonstrated by Netanyahu’s Israel, that means now is the time for pursuing one’s most maximalist goals.

So long as America remains lost to its internal purge, it is anything goes internationally. Peace will be had, alright, once the intense (and entirely necessary) killing is complete, particularly of those individuals who don’t respect borders (they now being, in our minds, an even bigger global threat than governments and militaries who don’t respect borders).

Such realizations fit our world in which climate change turns us all into two types of people: those put desperately on the move and those who have to deal with those put desperately on the move. The former tend to be younger, the latter tend to be far older — a potent mix for conflict.

Who needs forever wars over there when we truly need them here? The ties that allegedly bind us have nothing on the borders that demarcate our tribe’s sacred lands — at least for a couple of years.

Force versus friction: embrace whichever works best for you and see you on the other side.

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