MAGA’s war on “woke” has a long history — like 400 years

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.

Team Trump claims to want the broadly shared prosperity of a 1950s-style industrial boom, but without the progressive taxation and expanded welfare state that made it possible. They also want a new American empire, vaguely modeled on the great-power glory days of the 1890s, but built on the cheap and based on extortion rather than military conquest. Spoiler alert: They don’t really want any those things. Those are just memes, about as realistic as the one about King Trump taking a dump on protesters, designed to distract attention from the imposition of a brutal but incompetent police state.

But the question we should ask is how far these fantasies go. Reversing nearly all the immigration of the last six decades? Absolutely. Overturning Brown v. Board of Education? Probably, but on the DL. Rolling back the entire New Deal and all the labor reforms of the 20th century? Hell to the yes. Undoing women’s suffrage and birthright citizenship and the Civil War and most of the Constitution? Yeah, maybe,. Let’s change the subject.

During the first Trump administration I wrote a series of columns (the first one linked in the inset above) that tried to define our bewildering new era as “World War IV,” a concept borrowed from the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. 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.”

Almost no one in George W. Bush’s war-fever 2002 America wanted to hear a French egghead tell them that 9/11 had already become a fictional event, a “Manhattan disaster movie” fueled by a collective death wish. In Baudrillard’s deliberately hyperbolic phrase, “They did it, but we wished for it.” That might have been twisting the knife too hard, and was easily misinterpreted. But in a larger historical context, of course he was he right: Not that you and I actually wanted to see thousands of people die that day, but that the traumatic events of 9/11, and their aftermath, were like a volcanic release of the suppressed tensions and contradictions built up within our society.

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.”

Um, yeah. When I first tried to apply Baudrillard’s template to the Trump era in 2017, it felt far closer to reality than it had 15 years earlier. I doubt I need to tell anyone who has lived through the past year in America how it feels today.

Baudrillard died in 2007 and did not observe the rise of Trump or the resurgence of Europe’s far right, although he might well have seen those things as proof of concept. His notional World War IV, understood as an internal crisis for the liberal-democratic societies of Western Europe and North America, was historically specific to the sudden rupture of the post-9/11 world, but I think it also serves as a much larger metaphor. (According to his eccentric historical scheme, by the way, World War III was the Cold War.)

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 was no wokeness, no political correctness, no gender-neutral bathrooms. Nobody used pronouns or talked about inequality or intersectionality or was gay (except sometimes in the locker room) or tried to make us ashamed for being awesome.

If that sounds like a 1997 frat party elevated to political abstraction, fair enough. MAGA’s explicit promise is to reassert white supremacy — along with its inescapable corollaries, male dominance and mandatory heterosexuality — while cleansing it of all guilt, all self-doubt, all uncertainty. History’s newsreels will run backward such that the crimes of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and so forth either never happened or were never crimes. (Your mileage may vary.)

This is a losing battle by definition, one that testifies to the nihilistic self-hatred and appetite for self-destruction that Baudrillard observed in 2002. There is no such age of innocence to be found anywhere, clear back to the dawn of the modern era. What we would now describe as white supremacy and colonial domination came with a bad conscience from the beginning. Consider Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar born in 1484 who described Christopher Columbus as a genocidal monster, or Michel de Montaigne, who wrote in the 1580s that even Indigenous people who practiced ritual cannibalism weren’t as evil or corrupt as the Europeans who conquered and enslaved them, and “who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.”

Of course the Trump regime can win short-term victories by destroying historical landmarks, purging history textbooks and re-erecting the statues of conquerors and enslavers. But it can never erase or control the psychological and spiritual ambiguity at the heart of modern existence. Wokeness is just a mildly irritating new word for something that is not new at all, the human tendency toward self-doubt and self-criticism, which will reassert itself even under the most totalitarian regime. Columbus and Robert E. Lee were briefly and desperately retconned in the 20th century as avatars of racial hierarchy and ethnic pandering. But both had already been “canceled” during their lifetimes, and cannot be rescued from the ultimate judgment of history.

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“National conservatives” like Miller and JD Vance and their fire-breathing allies in America and elsewhere like to present themselves, LOTR-cosplay fashion, as “defenders of the West.” They are nothing of the kind. You don’t need to excuse any of the historical crimes of Western civilization to agree with historian Patrick Boucheron that its internalized self-critique, the awareness of profound contradiction that begins (at least) with las Casas and Montaigne, is one of its central defining characteristics:

Ever since Montaigne, European consciousness has accused itself of barbarity, and this self-accusation … is perhaps Montaigne’s most precious legacy — hence the serious resentment one can feel toward those who worship national identity and ignore what constitutes the heart, though perhaps the toxic heart, of Europe’s collective consciousness: the anxiety of now being the world’s barbarians.

This is “the scar that history has given us,” Boucheron continues, and ever since “we have been born already fissured, disturbed, uneasy.” Western history and culture contain more evidence of that unease that can possibly be enumerated, from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” to Thomas Jefferson, the father of American democracy, tying himself in knots over the evils of slavery to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (clearly referenced above by Boucheron).

In its most distilled form, MAGA ideology promises to salve that unease and heal the fissure, transporting its believers into an AI-slop alternate universe where the heart of darkness has been whitewashed and no one remembers slavery or imperialism or misogyny or thinks any of that was a problem. That’s a lot more ambitious than simply undoing the major political and social reforms of the last century. It’s more like transforming human consciousness, and the fact that it can’t be done doesn’t mean it won’t be massively destructive.

Stephen Miller, as it happens, has an extensive history of public comments that echo white nationalist talking points about the historical errors of “the West,” which has engaged in “self-punishment” by opening its borders to “reverse colonization” and becoming “the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights.” (That the “foreign labor class” in question included Miller’s great-grandparents goes unmentioned.) He would presumably say that he just wants to purge “the West” of its toxic self-doubt. Or to put it another way, he wants to destroy Western civilization in order to save it.