"'History,' E. M. Cioran once wrote, 'is irony on the move.' Bearing out this maxim, cultural revolutions have now erupted right in the heart of Western democracies...."

"The appeal of Maoism for many Western activists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies came from its promise of spontaneous direct democracy—political engagement outside the conventional framework of elections and parties. This seemed a way out of a crisis caused by calcified party bureaucracies, self-serving élites.... Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through 'mass movements, communities organized around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties'—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, 'no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.' Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred ruling class and its cherished monuments. Trump failed to purge all the old élites, largely because he was forced to depend on them, and the Proud Boys never came close to matching the ferocity and reach of the Red Guards. Nevertheless, Trump’s most devoted followers, whether assaulting his opponents or bombarding the headquarters in Washington, D.C., took their society to the brink of civil war while their chairman openly delighted in chaos under heaven. Order appears to have been temporarily restored (in part by Big Tech, one of Trump’s enablers). But the problem of political representation in a polarized, unequal, and now economically debilitated society remains treacherously unresolved. Four traumatic years of Trump are passing into history, but the United States seems to have completed only the first phase of its own cultural revolution."

From "What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for Our Current Moment?/The great question of China’s Maoist experiment now looms over the United States: Why did a powerful society suddenly start destroying itself?" by Pankaj Mishra (The New Yorker).