Just one piece today, a longish piece I’m going to go through fairly carefully, since it puts current issues about MAGA and conservative regression into a broad context, broader I’d say than the 400 years stated in the title.
Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 8 Feb 2026: MAGA’s war on “woke” has a long history — like 400 years, subtitled “Trump and Stephen Miller don’t just want to erase the 20th century. Their dream is much bigger than that”
Beginning:
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.
This goes to the narrow point that nostalgic “Make America Great Again” yearns for a simplistic past that never actually existed, as many people who are smarter than MAGA have noted over and over again. But it also goes to a broad theme of this blog: that human nature, over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, has become optimized, via evolution, for life in a very different environment than the one we live in today. Humanity has only existed in settlements, driven by agriculture, for 12,000 years or so; in big cities that are hubs for worldwide commerce for only a few hundred years. Modern circumstances irritate the deeply atavistic intuitions of base human nature, in many people. (Though not all, or our modern society could never have formed in the first place.)
Moving on. The things MAGA wants aren’t internally consistent, which is why you can’t go back again.
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.
MAGA ignores, for example, how the 1950s was not so sunny for anyone who was not white, straight, and Christian. They don’t care. It’s all about them.
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.
O’Hehir recalls the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who argued that 9/11 actually exposed a deep cultural rift in Western culture.
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.
(And these tensions etc I would argue go back to basic human nature uncomfortable with the modern world. Remember that the modern world was *inevitable* given the growth of the human population, and also the discoveries of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution which, if not by the West, would have occurred to someone else around the world. Islam, Catholic Church, etc. But few political writers have an evolutionary perspective.)
According to Baudrillard, the Cold War was World War III.
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.
This is what they yearn for:
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.
And,
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.)
The uncertainty part is key, since I’ve been defining conservatives as living in a black and white world in which all issues (usually based on selective readings of the Bible) are certain.
Next para, with some examples from history:
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.”
As always, people believe the history they want to believe, and that flatters themselves. Next para, putting “wokeness” into context:
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.
Ending with:
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.
And then a final paragraph about Stephen Miller:
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.
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The thing is, this is all a display of the conflicts within human nature, variously expressed over long history as means to survive. Primitive xenophobia worked in the ancient past; it doesn’t work so well today, not if you’re a nation that might prosper with international cooperation, or suffer if you reject it.
Which is to say, we will never be over this. There’s a portion of the human population that cannot get past their atavistic intuitions, while those who can have built the modern world, and might actually advance the human species onto other worlds, as science fiction has always imagined. The xenophobes and tribalists will be left behind, to stew in their juices. Perhaps humanity might split…
