A collection of twenty-six commentaries on the Trump phenomenon and the MAGA movement, written during the period stretching from the Republican National Convention of 2024 to the closing of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. They analyze the MAGA project from a Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist perspective. They take notice of the support of the movement among workers and small-town and rural America; the gradually increasing support by respectable conservative think tanks and colleges; the ethnic and gender diversity of the movement's leadership in practice; and the irrational opposition of the mainstream media and establishment institutions. They maintain that the themes of Trump and MAGA are reasonable reactions to US economic, political, and cultural decadence, stressing in this regard MAGA's emphasis on improving the productivity of the national economy; its desire to rectify various forms of lawlessness; its appreciation of the democratic tradition of the nation and the West, even as past social sins are recognized; and its desire to formulate a coherent and credible national narrative and to renovate national culture. These characteristics are like the dynamics of the people's revolutions of the Global South, except for the MAGA movement's lack of consistent anti-imperialist consciousness, which reflects its emergence on the colonizer side of the colonial divide.The commentaries emphasize that the MAGA movement rose to political power on the basis of an anti-establishment platform that included rejection of the neoliberal economic policies and the neoconservative militarism of recent decades. It seeks in essence not the resurrection of the fallen American Empire but the renewal of the American Republic, based in its historic principles of economic and political liberty. Its anti-globalism potentially places it against the economic structures and cultural assumptions of the neocolonial world-system.
A collection of twenty-six commentaries on the Trump phenomenon and the MAGA movement, written during the period stretching from the Republican National Convention of 2024 to the closing of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. They analyze the MAGA project from a Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist perspective. They take notice of the support of the movement among workers and small-town and rural America; the gradually increasing support by respectable conservative think tanks and colleges; the ethnic and gender diversity of the movement's leadership in practice; and the irrational opposition of the mainstream media and establishment institutions. They maintain that the themes of Trump and MAGA are reasonable reactions to US economic, political, and cultural decadence, stressing in this regard MAGA's emphasis on improving the productivity of the national economy; its desire to rectify various forms of lawlessness; its appreciation of the democratic tradition of the nation and the West, even as past social sins are recognized; and its desire to formulate a coherent and credible national narrative and to renovate national culture. These characteristics are like the dynamics of the people's revolutions of the Global South, except for the MAGA movement's lack of consistent anti-imperialist consciousness, which reflects its emergence on the colonizer side of the colonial divide.The commentaries emphasize that the MAGA movement rose to political power on the basis of an anti-establishment platform that included rejection of the neoliberal economic policies and the neoconservative militarism of recent decades. It seeks in essence not the resurrection of the fallen American Empire but the renewal of the American Republic, based in its historic principles of economic and political liberty. Its anti-globalism potentially places it against the economic structures and cultural assumptions of the neocolonial world-system.
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