The Peace Monument close to the US Capitol in Washington, DC, can also be getting with the occasions. (photograph through Wikimedia Commons, edit Shari Flores/Hyperallergic)
The similarities between the feelings of extremists in Iran’s authorities 45 years in the past and the US in the present day are apparent, a lot in order that the chilling assertion by Kevin Roberts, president of the right-wing Heritage Basis — that “we are in the process of a second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” — is completely within the spirit of Khomeini.
Whether or not Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian Kulturkampf from 1871 to 1878 or Chairman Mao Zedong’s Chinese language Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, governments of each the suitable and left have sometimes carried out sweeping, oppressive, and continuously violent state-mandated social rebellions. Relatively than merely altering political preparations, a cultural revolution sees a nation go to battle with itself. Below such a state, the federal government targets universities and media, museums and memorials. Marked by the negation and destruction of a nation’s establishments, such a course of is by definition nihilistic. It’s by nature anti-tradition, even when pursued by these on the suitable, whose conservatism has traded conservation for fervent authoritarianism. Lastly, regardless of being managed by a central energy, cultural revolutions are inevitably chaotic. Although Trump and Mao are on reverse sides of the political spectrum, and few would confuse the US president with the supreme chief of Iran, there are actually management similarities. In The Cultural Revolution: A Folks’s Historical past, 1962–1976 (2016), Frank Dikötter described Mao as “erratic, whimsical and fitful, thriving in willed chaos,” a pacesetter who ruled by intuition and improvization and who relished a “game in which he could constantly rewrite the rules … [where] people scrambled to prove their loyalty.” Sound acquainted?
However Dikötter additionally writes that Mao was “cold and calculating,” as certainly the experts of the Trump administration are, whether or not Bondi, Miller, or Roberts (or any variety of others). Such disarray serves a goal: A radical restructuring of all parts of America’s cultural life from greater training to the media. As authorized battles are fought over phrases, so are cultural revolutions fought over aesthetics and imagery, over artwork. This can be a famous departure from Trump’s first administration, whereby American cultural establishments, a minimum of, functioned largely unhampered. The second Trump administration has an much more apocalyptic orientation. The 900-page Heritage Basis’s Undertaking 2025 labels those that disagree with its sweeping proposals to increase draconian legal guidelines policing particular person liberties on the expense of welfare, together with assaults on girls’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, labor rights, and free speech as “anti-American.” Its main creator, Russell Vought, the present and inordinately highly effective director of the Workplace of Administration and Funds, has bragged about how he desires those that fall beneath that label to really feel “trauma.” The distinction between this cultural revolution and people in Germany, China, or Iran, shouldn’t be of variety, however of diploma, and solely up to now.
Tens of 1000’s rallied in opposition to Trump and DOGE in New York Metropolis’s HandsOff protest on April 5, 2025. (photograph Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
The total litany of assaults on cultural establishments specifically ought to dissuade anybody from considering that current occasions are simply extra Trumpian randomness, versus a concentrated, coordinated, and intentional multi-pronged effort. Take, for instance, Trump’s elimination of the Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts’ nonpartisan board and his instating himself as chairman, in addition to his ongoing assaults on greater training, from the withholding of promised funding for arts establishments to the current assaults on Harvard. In Might, Trump signed an govt order canceling federal funding for each the Public Broadcasting System and Nationwide Public Radio, referring to the organizations that, amongst different capabilities, fund the documentaries of Ken Burns, Ira Glass’s This American Life, Terry Gross’s All Issues Thought-about, and Sesame Road as being “RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”
That very same month, Trump fired the revered Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden — a patently unconstitutional transfer, for the reason that establishment is beneath the purview of the legislative department, and one which has been challenged in courtroom and bravely resisted by workers. White Home Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Hayden, director of a non-lending analysis library that collects all printed materials in the US, was fired as a result of she had put “inappropriate books in the library for children.” The most recent proposed funds launched this month requests the elimination of each the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities and the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts. Most not too long ago, he tried to fireplace the director of the Nationwide Portrait Gallery, citing her help for DEI initiatives.
Already allotted funds for each have been diverted to Trump’s “Garden of Heroes” memorial, a web site that Gal Beckerman of The Atlantic perceptively compares to the monuments of Benito Mussolini, whereas candidates to the NEA have found that the group will now prioritize initiatives that “celebrate and honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.” The little-known however essential Institute of Museum and Library Providers was pressured to cancel thousands and thousands of {dollars} in grants to organizations all through the nation, whereas the administration pressured the world-class Nationwide Gallery of Artwork to shut down their places of work dedicated to variety, fairness, and inclusion. In the meantime, a March govt order with the Orwellian title of “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” attacked the Smithsonian, eliminating positions and exhibitions with the intent to “remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.”
Screenshot of a tweet encapsulating what Amanda Marcotte calls “Mar-a-Lago face” (screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/ Hyperallergic through Bluesky)
Predictably, Trump has changed or is making an attempt to interchange a lot of the management at surviving establishments and places of work with lickspittle lackeys, middling non-experts who will commit what packages stay to pablum and kitsch, one thing apparent within the appointment of Siggy Flicker, a star of the Actual Housewives of New Jersey, to the board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Even when grifting have been this administration’s solely transgression, that will be unhealthy sufficient. However the outcomes of this cultural revolution will probably be solely darker. A wide range of completely different factions are concerned within the Trumpian second, from the Christian Nationalists of the so-called New Apostolic Reformation to the Darkish Enlightenment motion in Silicon Valley, however a sure operative aesthetic appears to have emerged out of this mélange. Amanda Marcotte, in an astute March essay in Salon, examines the visible idiom of MAGA from the hyper-attenuated cosmetic surgery that she calls “Mar-a-Lago face” to the Tesla cybertruck, hideous right-wing AI memes to Elon Musk’s sartorial selections. “In theory, we all prefer beauty over ugliness,” she writes. “[That] last proposition … has been seriously challenged in the era of Donald Trump.” Inspecting the uncanny valley impact of the bizarrely related facelifts of Matt Gaetz and Kristi Noem, to the odd AI memes that characteristic Trump and Musk as rugged cowboys, Marcotte describes how “Fascism, especially the 21st-century version practiced by the MAGA movement, is at war with reality. The hyperreality of the MAGA aesthetic is about power.”
I’d argue that AI artwork offers the proper fascist aesthetics for MAGA, exactly as a result of it’s so inhuman. That it slickly corresponds to the ideological commitments of the Silicon Valley supporters of Trump is an added bonus. Earlier propaganda was nonetheless the creation of precise human beings. Even probably the most hinged of up to date right-wing propaganda, such because the work of Jon McNaughton, who imagines Trump in quite a lot of heroic poses, whether or not surrounded by historic figures praying over him within the Oval Workplace or using on a bike with Melania holding on behind him, was nonetheless produced by an precise human being. In the end, McNaughton reads as extra schmaltzy than actually ominous, whereas work made by synthetic intelligence is really of this present techno-fascist second, not essentially simply due to what it depicts, but in addition due to the way it was created. Pictures corresponding to Trump using upon a lion or triumphantly surveying the Canadian wilderness from the highest of a mountain are fascist as a matter in fact, however what’s most annoying is that MAGA has achieved a type of humanities-without-the-human, a real demise of the artist themselves.
“The old world is dying,” wrote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in Jail Notebooks (1929), contemplating the implications of Mussolini. “Now is the time of monsters.” Actually, ample digital monsters are on show within the video simulacra outlined by this new MAGA aesthetic. Witness the perverse video that Trump shared which reimagines Gaza right into a resort and the place the residents supplicate earlier than a golden statue of the president or the numerous slick productions of the mysterious Dor Brothers, whose algorithms create quick movies of a vaguely Goodfellas-adjacent Trump counting cash, brandishing weapons, and surrounded by fashions, all of it animated with a propulsive hip-hop rating. Such imagery, which is replete on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, is conceived not by a thoughts however a pc, and is thus the proper encapsulation of an period that’s now past aesthetics — and apparently, past politics. A type of fascism the place the chief is much less vital than the picture — certainly, the place there’s scarcely any relationship between the 2. Specializing in the ample deficiencies of Trump’s character has at all times been a liberal’s class mistake, for the president scarcely issues as a lot as what he represents. One might think about a dystopia ruled by a hologram of Trump that wouldn’t differ a lot from the current. Which is to say that precise artwork, which is made by actual individuals in circumstances divorced from this burgeoning monoculture, is now all of the extra subversive and all of the extra essential. A return to neighborhood artwork, of face-to-face interplay, of labor that isn’t reliant on the official channels of energy. For there to be real resistance, it turns into all of the extra vital that it’s native, and all of the extra crucially, that it’s human, with all of the connotations of that phrase.
