Mao Zedong

Source: Zhang Zhenshi

One big difference is the American left lacks anyone with the charisma of the Chairman. Mao was a rock star, at least compared with the understated Chinese norm. Maoism made Stalinism look drab. Paul Johnson wrote:

In his artistic longings, in his romanticism and in his belief that will is the key not only to power but to accomplishment, Mao was an oriental Hitler…. Like Hitler, Mao loved politics as theatre…. But to this he added a sun-culture of his own…

Mao’s round face was portrayed in propaganda posters as the red sun rising in the east.

In contrast, Obama was a golfer and Hillary in 2016 was the anti-Mao. While the Chairman routinely attracted crowds of hundreds of thousands, Hillary couldn’t fill a high school gym.

Another contrast is that the Chinese, like Sesame Street’s The Count, love counting. Histories of the Cultural Revolution are replete with enumerated terms, such as the Four Olds, the Gang of Four, the Sixteen Points, the Five Black Categories, and, my favorite, the Two Whatevers.

American social justice jihadis, on the other hand, tend to be innumerate.

Another difference is that Maoists were organized along class lines to represent the rural masses. Mao’s great accomplishment in 1949 was to build a revolution off of the countryside, which orthodox Marxism-Leninism said couldn’t be done. While the Bolsheviks in Russia tended to be city folk who loathed the peasantry, Maoists tended to be farmers who hated the cultured urbanites.

In contrast, America’s Democrats are a high-low coalition with pretenses toward sophistication. While the Chinese Cultural Revolution despised refinement, leading to lowbrow slogans like “Those who are against Chairman Mao will have their dog skulls smashed into pieces,” America’s left wants to be seen as educated; thus, multisyllabic terms like “microaggressions.” But these phrases turn out almost as stupid as “running dogs.”

The seventysomething Mao brilliantly perceived in the mid-1960s the worldwide youth movement set off by the postwar baby boom and offered himself as its leader. (In 1968, a rival for leadership of the world’s young scoffed:

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao

You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow

Mao later became immensely respected in the West from 1972 until about 1977, when people suddenly realized his Cultural Revolution had been a catastrophe.)

Today, though, there aren’t all that many young people, and youth isn’t particularly fashionable.

Outside of the occasional Evergreen State, American educational institutions are torn between promoting social justice warfare and maximizing revenue. Ironically, the increasing dependence of American colleges on full-tuition-paying Chinese students, who have nothing but contempt for African-American Cultural Revolutionaries (“Hey, hey, hey, this is library!”), inclines them toward prudence.

Of course, the biggest difference of all is that America doesn’t at present have a leftist leader. While China’s Cultural Revolution launched Mao back into supreme power, the Late Obama Age Collapse put Donald Trump in the White House. For example, as The New York Times grudgingly admitted this week, Trump has won his struggle with those who wanted to turn the NFL into the BLM.