MAGA's war on "woke" has a long history -- like 400 years
MAGA’s war on “woke” has a long history — like 400 years
Trump and Stephen Miller don’t just want to erase the 20th century. Their dream is much bigger than that
By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published February 8, 2026 6:45AM (EST)
(Salon) 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.
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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.
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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. ..................(more)
https://www.salon.com/2026/02/08/magas-war-on-woke-has-a-long-history-like-400-years/
= new reply since forum marked as read
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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.
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https://www.salon.com/2026/02/08/magas-war-on-woke-has-a-long-history-like-400-years/
Thanks for the thread marmar