The opening paragraph:
One explicit goal of the second Trump administration, if not its defining mission, is to undo the recent past and rewrite history to fit its own master narrative. By now it’s axiomatic that making America “great again” has never referred to any fixed point in the actual American past; it’s more like a mashup or highlight reel of random images taken from eras before any living American was born. We can see that vision embodied with startling literalness in the propaganda posters recently concocted by the Labor Department, such as the depiction of a whites-only church picnic apparently taking place in Uncanny Valley. If the rise of Donald Trump preceded the advent of AI slop, it may also have conjured it into existence: Never in cultural history have form and content been so perfectly matched.
We already know that Trump and his inner circle — which mostly means Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, the high priests of MAGA ideology — want to erase the gains of the civil rights movement, LGBTQ equality and feminism. But their true goals are far more ambitious, if less easy to define. This is a fake presidency devoted more to creating viral memes than shaping policy, and there’s no coherent or consistent narrative at work. Honestly, that’s less a flaw than a feature: The wholesale rejection of reality is central to the brand.
The O'Hehir goes on to talk and idea that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard advanced in the wake of 9/11:
He was widely pilloried for arguing, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, that those traumatic events did not actually reflect an apocalyptic showdown between Western democracy and illiberal Islamic radicalism but rather an important historical transition and “the emergence of a radical antagonism” within Western civilization itself. There was a “deep-seated complicity,” Baudrillard wrote, between the dominant world order defined by global capitalism and liberal democracy and those who would destroy it: “The West, in the position of God, has become suicidal, and declared war on itself.”
Whoaah! But maybe he had a point:
Baudrillard was also correct, to an eerie time-traveler degree, in predicting a “gigantic abreaction” to the terrorist attacks, a system-wide “moral and psychological downturn” that threatened to undermine “the whole ideology of freedom … on which the Western world prided itself.” The liberal-capitalist global order, he suggested, was in danger of being turned into its dark mirror-image, “a police-state globalization, a total control, a terror based on ‘law-and-order’ measures.”
And so:
There is nothing new about the bad conscience or self-destructive urge that Baudrillard identified within Western civilization, or about its deeply rooted conflict between incompatible tendencies we might call liberation and domination. He doesn’t use those words, nor does he ever mention “democracy” and “fascism,” which are imperfect modern manifestations of that conflict, and pin us down too much to present-tense politics.
Understood that way, we have been fighting World War IV for centuries. Stephen Miller and the would-be king he serves are fighting it now, with considerable vigor and ambition. Their imagined victory is completely impossible, profoundly dangerous and breathtaking in scale. In its fullest expression, it envisions undoing nearly all of modern history and returning to some primal, purified state of nature, or rather a meme version thereof: The 1950s and the antebellum South and the American frontier and medieval feudalism and the Neanderthal fireside — almost literally everything, everywhere, all at once.
Admittedly, even the most articulate MAGA ideologues — not that there are many — haven’t gone that far. But that’s where the collective brotastic idiocies of Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson and Curtis Yarvin and Andrew Tate and Pete Hegseth and whomever else all converge: Somewhere in the recent or distant or mythical past, everything totally ruled and “we” (a term of art, I hasten to add) never felt bad about any of it. Guys were guys and women were hot and there was lots of feasting and stuff.
There's more at the link.
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