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Reading about China's Cultural Revolution is useful when wondering how millions of people can be radicalized, seemingly overnight, by a skilled demagogue (1/x)
The CR began a few years after The Great Leap Forward, a man-made famine in which 30 to 60 million died of starvation — all covered up by Mao and the Chinese government
During the CR, virtually everything in China just stopped. People set aside their lives in order to participate in round-the-clock political campaigns, which often involved violent denunciations of people in their lives: parents, siblings, teachers, etc.
By the end of it, a decade later, Mao was dead, but the Communist Party have maintained power to the present day. There's never really been a national reckoning with what happened. Mao's successors decreed that he was about "70 percent correct" and that was that
To this day, Mao's portrait hangs above Tiananmen gate, the symbol of China, and his face adorns all paper money. (Which, ironically, few people use anymore due to the prevalence of mobile payments).
The fact that Xi Jinping has amassed so much power so quickly would not have been possible, I think, if China had fully reckoned with its Maoist past in the way that Germany did with the Nazis
Trump isn't Mao. But the notion that we should just move on and forget what happened, I think, will only ensure that it happens again. You can't heal, as an individual or a country, if you don't reckon with your past honestly and openly.
