[ Signs that MAGA is enmeshed in post-Vietnam War culture begin
with its namesake. Make America Great Again is an adoption of Ronald
Reagan’s assertion that it was “Morning in America Again,” - the
country was moving on from its Vietnam War nightmare.]
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MAGA’S REVANCHIST ROOTS: A TALE OF TROPES  
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Jerry Lembcke
December 13, 2023
CounterPunch
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*
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*
*
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_ Signs that MAGA is enmeshed in post-Vietnam War culture begin with
its namesake. Make America Great Again is an adoption of Ronald
Reagan’s assertion that it was “Morning in America Again,” - the
country was moving on from its Vietnam War nightmare. _

Image by visuals // CounterPunch,

 

A year out from the 2024 presidential election, a _New York
Times_/Siena poll showed the Republican former President Donald Trump
leading the incumbent Democrat Joe Biden in five of six swing states
– this, despite Trump having skipped two televised Republican Party
debates and facing 4 criminal indictments.[
[[link removed]]1]
[[link removed]]

Trump’s defiance of political gravity has spawned a genre of
Trump-studies, most focused on his character and the personalities of
his devotees: The title of _New York Times’_s Maggie Haberman’s
book _Confidence Man_ is coda for her attribution of Trumpism to the
perverse magnetism of his arrested development; Robert
Draper’s _Weapons of Mass Delusion_ follows suit, psychologizing
his followers’ plunge “into a Trumpian cult of compulsive
disassembling and conspiracy mongering.”

These books’ spotlight on persons and personalities were powered by
Nicole Hemmer’s earlier book _Partisans: The Conservative
Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s._ It was
the Rush Limbaughs and Pat Buchanans, she said, who had marshalled the
power of talk-radio to untether the GOP from mainstream public opinion
and realign it with “partisan punditry and political
entertainment.” The 1990s, said _New York Magazine_ writer Gabriel
Debenedetti in his October 9, 2022 review of Hemmer’s book for _The
New York Times_, agreed that the 1990s is where responsibility for
today’s political turns will be found.

Commenting on Trump’s tenacity, Carlos Lozada in “How the House of
Trump Was Built” (_New York Times_ Dec 28, 2022), cautioned against
“versions of history that place a singular individual at their
center.” Also known as “great men” theories of history, his
caveat would apply to media influencers like Limbaugh and Buchanan and
Trump himself.

Still, in explaining Trump’s late 2023 lead over Biden in
her _Times_ column, “What Voters Want that Trump Seems to Have,”
Michelle Cottle could do no better than contrast the candidates’
personal qualities. Voter upset with inflation, crime, and the surge
of migrants would be a factor, she acknowledged, but on Election Day
it would be Trump’s “stiff-arm” of the “doddering and frail”
Biden that made the difference.

The danger in personalizing politics in that way is its presumption
that a change of political actors will change the script – that
Trump’s departure from the scene will alter the national. political
trajectory. It won’t. But why? If Trump’s perverse charisma and
the persuasiveness of media influencers does not explain his grip on
voters, what then?

Think horses not zebras. It’s a common phrase in the literature on
medical culture: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. A
play on the principle known as Occam’s Razor, the saying captures
the idea that the obvious diagnosis for an ailment is often better
than something more erudite; applied here to the questions about
Trump’s enduring popularity, it points to the tropes of the Trump
movement themselves as clues: if “Vietnam” isn’t the answer to
the implicit question in the movement’s moniker, Make America Great
Again —when and where_ did_ America lose its greatness? —the
zebras are obscuring the horses. And the other Trumpian tropes? The
Deep State, and Americans Left Behind? They, too, trace back to the
war in Vietnam and the revanchist political culture spawned by its
loss.

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN

Worries that social and political weakness on the home front had
robbed the military of victory in Vietnam metastasized in the post-war
years into suspicions that untoward and even subversive activism was
to blame. The public’s return to personal and political priorities
set aside during the war allowed the lost-war angst to go unnoticed as
it quietly pooled into a font of resentment tapped into by nationalist
and militarist movements decades later.[2]

Signs that MAGA is enmeshed in post-Vietnam War culture begin with its
namesake. Make America Great Again is an adoption of Ronald Reagan’s
assertion that it was “Morning in America Again,” that the country
was moving on from its Vietnam War nightmare.

Vietnam as the point of departure for Reagan’s new day is evinced in
his 1980 declaration of the war as “a noble cause,” his hoisting
the POW-MIA flag over the White House in 1982, and his proclamation of
May 7, 1985, as Vietnam Veteran Recognition Day. In the wake of the
1978 Iranian hostage crisis and the day after watching _Rambo: First
Blood Part II_, a hot mic caught him saying, “Boy, after seeing
Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.”

From Reagan, the thread of American preoccupation with Vietnam is
continuous, running through President George H.W. Bush’s declaration
that we had, “kicked the Vietnam Syndrome” in the Persian Gulf war
of 1990-91, to Barack Obama’s 2012 allusion to the anti-war
movement’s responsibility for the loss in Vietnam, to Donald
Trump’s insinuation that U.S. pilots like John McCain shot down over
Vietnam signaled mission failure, not heroics.[
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But if Reagan was about moving on in a new day, MAGA is distinguished
by its “back to the future” thrust. It’s followers would have us
return to a prelapsarian Edenic way of life that it believes was lost
along with the war in Vietnam. They would have us restoring
institutional forms that made America great in the first place, as
they see it, one of those being traditional forms of marriage and
family.

By their reading, the urbanization of life in the post-World War II
years had broken the father-son bonds characteristic of rural work.
With fathers pulled into factory and office work, boys were raised by
moms in an effeminizing home environment. The specter of “momism,”
as historian Elaine May wrote about it in _Fortress America_, averred
that America had sent a generation of sissified boys off to fight the
war in Vietnam; not up to the task, these softies were also receptive
to pacificist appeals often voiced by women.[
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The adoption of female attire by young men in the 1960s and
1970s—peace symbols worn as necklaces, bellbottom pants worn with
blousy tops, and long hair— signaled their identification with
feminine culture and rejection, specifically, of the military “high
and tight.” By the late 1960s, home-front countercultural styles had
made their way to Vietnam where they became a flipped finger to
military authority by unruly troops.[
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Women had indeed played major roles in the antiwar movement. Women
Strike for Peace initiated outreach to the Vietnamese people, sending
representatives to Hanoi in 1965; scores of activists and celebrities
followed in their footsteps in the coming years. But the climate of
fault-finding that followed the loss of the war demeaned and even
vilified women’s work for peace. Actress Jane Fonda who had gone to
Hanoi in 1972 and met with imprisoned U.S. POWs was likened to the
apocryphal Tokyo Rose of World War II notoriety, both figures invoking
a litany of female perfidy beginning with the biblical Delila.
Duplicity and stealth were staple tactics in those stories: Delila
emasculating Sampson while he slept; Fonda presenting herself as a
Hollywood seductress until unmasking as an anti-war warrior woman. In
2005 edition of the Comcast news show “It’s Your Call with Lynn
Doyle,” Mary Jane McManus, the wife of ex-POW Kevin McManus, was
asked by the moderator whom she blamed for the U.S. defeat. It was
forces at home, she said, who conspired to turn victory into defeat:
the media, politicians, and Jane Fonda.[
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_The Deep State_
_[Trump] is the battering ram that God is using_
_to bring down the Deep State of Babylon._
_Charles Pace, Pastor_
_Mt. Carmel Church, Waco Texas._

The loss of the war in Vietnam was such a turning point for Americans
because of the disparity in the powers brought to the war,
respectively, by the United States and Vietnam. How could this small,
underdeveloped country of outgunned peasants have defeated the most
powerful military force on earth?

The answer embraced by pro-military conservatives was that the United
States had _not_ lost to the Vietnamese. Rather, it was civilian
fifth columnists at home who had tied one hand behind the back of the
military: liberals in Congress had refused to fund tactics that could
have won the war, and communists, socialists and campus radicals had
opposed the war with tactics that demoralized American forces and
given aid and comfort to the enemy.

In 1971, a 234-page treatise “The Viet Cong Front in the United
States” was read into the _Congressional Record_ of the
92nd Congress by California Congressman John Schmitz. Schmitz was a
member of the John Birch Society and a coauthor of that document that
exaggerated the roles of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers
Party in antiwar organizations such as The Mobilization Committee to
End the War in Vietnam.[
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In shortform, the loss of the war was laid at the feet of traitors.
The real enemy was in the halls of ivy and inside the Washington
Beltway. Birchers repeated McCarthyite canards that communists had
infiltrated the government, the hardcore version of the deep state
myth that MAGA would promote 50 years later.[
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INTELLECTUALS: A STATE WITHIN THE STATE.

Belief in a deep state harkens to a state within the state, a
governmental apparatus with an unacknowledged existence lurking
beneath the surface of formal power. Evoking conspiracist thoughts, it
imagines mysterious powers that control the cultural and political
lives of workaday folks.

The “deep state” phrase triggers paranoia about educated elites in
government, colleges and universities, news organizations, and
Hollywood. Inaccessible to most people, these settings exist in many
minds only through their representations in film, literature, and news
reports. Hollywood, of course, gins its own fantasies—about itself.
And there is a special mystic about colleges and
universities—“What goes on there?” When the Nixon administration
came down on the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, Vice President Spiro
Agnew named the enemy: “an effete corps of impudent snobs who
characterize themselves as intellectuals.”[
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Intellectuals. The bugaboo that there are people who work with ideas,
and use those ideas against the rest of us, is as pernicious as it is
old. Dating from the aftermath of the French Revolution, suspicions
about what had inspired the rebels and who (or what?) was responsible
for their ideas conjured haints of mysterious forces at work to undo
the religious and civil order.[
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The illusiveness of ideas and those who have them was fodder for
conspiracy theories that were, wrote psychologist Nisha Krishnan in
“The Illuminati Conspiracy Theory,” inherently anti-Semitic.
Modern antisemitism was hyped with ancient blood libel folklore—that
Jews killed Christian children for their blood for use in
rituals—and the myth that Jews killed Christ. Jews were scapegoated
in the 1890s Dreyfus Affair for France’s loss in the Franco-Prussian
war, and, later, Germany’s defeat in World War I.[
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The European iterations of Jewish wartime perfidy had their American
counterparts. Jews were rumored to have financed the 1910 Mexican
Revolution that restricted U.S. access to oil there. And with the U.S.
war in Vietnam going badly, Richard Nixon blamed Jews in the New York
media for the release of the Pentagon Papers revealing Government
lying about the war in Vietnam—that “damn Jew [_Times _editor
Max] Frankel,” the President once ranted. The President once
referred to his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, as “my Jew
boy.”[
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The antisemitism sweeping the nation in the 2020s—more antisemitic
incidents in 2021 than any time in 40 years, according to the
anti-defamation league—is hard to separate from Donald Trump’s
call-out of Jewish philanthropist George Soros. It was Soros money,
claimed Trump, that backed the attorney general who went after him for
the Stormy Daniels hush-money case. Trump’s broadside attacks on the
news media and coastal elites strum antisemitic chords in his
listener’s ears; his embrace of the Q Anon network that traffics a
pedophilia conspiracy, echo the antisemitic blood libel fantasy in
MAGA imaginations.[13]

Just as MAGA’s obsessions with intellectual sedition and pedophilia
animate the imaginations of a deep state, so too does its objection to
Critical Race Theory come with a subplot: CRT was conceived at elite
university levels and then imposed on public schools. “Higher
education is the problem,” Cornell law professor and CRT critic
William Jacobson told Fox News on 2021. And if intellectual elites are
persons of interest, Jews are suspects. Posting on BitChute in 2021,
white supremacist Vincent James Foxx wrote, “. . . it’s almost
always Jewish Americans who are pushing [CRT]. . . . the white people
funding these sorts of ideas and pushing this sort of rhetoric are
always Jews.”

AMERICANS LEFT BEHIND

The controversies over critical race theory touch deep nerves in
conservative America. In the 1960s and 1970s, millions of white
Americans resenting the imposition of court authority to integrate
their children’s schools fled to the suburbs. In the same years,
school consolidations closed thousands of schools across the heartland
putting children on buses to neighboring towns. Teachers who
themselves had gone through 12 grades in those schools, and still
lived in town, were set adrift. The schools were the economic
lifeblood of farm towns in the rural Midwest and when they closed, so
did the local grocery stores, barbershops, and gas stations.

What school closings left standing was easy pickings for other changes
emanating from powers increasingly far removed from the grassroots.
The Interstate highway system broke local and regional commercial ties
while opening two-lane America to 18-wheeler supply chains. The
concentration of agricultural capital consolidated farmland,
foreclosing hundreds of thousands of family farms. “Get big or get
out,” said Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butts –
thousands of farmers sold their tractors and dairy herds and got out.

The generation that bore those losses is aging away but the
discouragement, frustration, and distrust of government etched in
family stories and boarded-up towns endures. Middle America had been
abandoned, discarded by Washington.

Phrases such as “forgotten Americans” and “Americans left
behind” have personal connotations in coastal suburbs and the
fly-over states. Still restive when the war in Vietnam ended and the
POWs held in Hanoi came home, the phrases caught new wind. The Nixon
administration had kept the war going, promising that our POWs would
not be abandoned. The return of POWs in February and March of 1973
were trophies seemingly validating Nixon’s commitment.

POWS LEFT BEHIND.

But did they _all_ come home? Speculation soon began that some
American prisoners were still held by the communists. Hardcore
rightists, angry that the peace accords ending the war short of a
clearcut victory, fed rumors that unnamed parties in the Washington
had dealt POWs to the Soviets in return for post-war favors.[
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The POW/MIA flag that flew over the Reagan White House had the caption
“You are Not Forgotten.” The words were a perfect contranym
because the National League of Families made up of wives of ex-POWs
had conceived and produced the flag in the last years of the war to
accuse the government and seemingly disinterested public having done
just that—forgotten the POWs and men missing in action. [
[[link removed]]15]
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With the war ten years gone when Reagan ran the flag up, and with no
credible evidence that there were any missing POWs to be forgotten,
the flag and its slogan became a kind of political prosthetic adopted
by a growing rightwing movement claiming a “forgotten” America as
its constituency. Legislation mandating its flying beneath the
national flag over federal buildings and then government buildings in
many states passed in the succeeding decades imbuing it with what
British writer Michael Billig called “banal nationalism,” a
surrogate kind of nationalism that is more felt than thought—an
empty vessel that MAGA could fill.[
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FROM RAMBO TO WACO AND BACK.

Public receptivity to the abandoned-POW narrative led to a Hollywood
genre of POW-rescue films of which _Rambo: First Blood Part
II _(1985) is the classic. Rambo, the character, may have been based
the real-life Bo Gritz, a highly decorated Green Beret veteran of
Vietnam. In 1978 he was approached by Ross Perot to resign from the
military and lead a mission to Southeast Asia to do what the
government refused to: rescue POWs still held there. Gritz took the
assignment. In a month-long operation launched from Thailand into
Laos, his men, deep into communist controlled territory, received word
that their mission had been betrayed. Under attack by the communist
Pathet Lao, they fought their way out without any POWs.

The experience confirmed for Gritz that the government was conspiring
to keep the fact of abandoned POWs a secret from the American people
and actually sabotage efforts like his to get them out – the
ultimate Washington betrayal story that would be supercharged with
events unfolding in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, the later
resounding forward 30 years in Trump’s campaign for the 2024
presidential election.

Perot ran for President in 1992 with ex-POW James Stockdale as his
running mate. Gritz’s war hero character garnered him a Sunday
supplement _Parade_ magazine cover portrait as the “American
Warrior.” His alignment with POW conspiracism put him in league with
the John Birch Society’s deep-state fantasies and the Ku Klux
Klan’s David Duke with whom he ran on the 1988 presidential ticket
of the antisemitic Populous Party.

Gritz’s persona fused right-wing emotions left over from the war in
Vietnam with domestic issues around gun rights, income tax, and Jewish
furtiveness when he involved himself in an August 1992 standoff at
Ruby Ridge, Idaho. There, Randy Weaver had ensconced his family off
the power grid, homeschooling, stockpiling weapons, and avoiding
taxes. When the FBI and U.S. marshals, attempted to arrest him, a gun
fight ensued, killing one marshal and two of Weaver’s children.
Gritz had known Weaver as a Green Beret and suspected the raid was a
government effort to assassinate Weaver because of what he knew about
POWs left behind in Vietnam.

If there were any holes in the tapestry of right-wing imagination that
unified unsettled sentiments of Vietnam and constitutional rights, the
holes were filled in Waco when on February 28, 1993, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided a religious center called Mount
Carmel. The center was occupied by the Branch Davidians, a Seventh-Day
Adventist offshoot that believed in the end of the world as prophesied
in the Bible’s book of Revelation. Shots were fired killing four
agents and six Davidians. Led by David Koresh who cut a Randy Weaver
figure, the Davidians and BATF dug in.

On April 19 M-60 tanks outfitted with wrecking booms rolled up to the
compound and began smashing the roof and walls. Gas canisters were
discharged into the building. A fire started that quickly consumed the
building killing seventy-nine people including twenty-five children.
The fire set off an explosion with a mushroom-like fireball that
network newscasts turned into an icon of apocalypse.

MAGA CLOSES THE CIRCLE

For many Americans, the trail from paranoia about communists in
college classrooms in the 1960s and government betrayal of the
military mission in Vietnam, through Republican Party revving lost-war
anguish for political gain in the 1980s, and on to the anti-government
movements of the new century might seem a long and discontinuous path
through unrelated events. But Donald Trump’s return to Waco in March
of 2023 confirms that the mindset of MAGA followers sees it all as a
piece.

Choosing Waco for his first campaign stop for the 2024 election
campaign was “on the nose” said the _Atlantic Magazine_ before
recounting the details of the 1992 government raid on Mr. Carmel
church. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed,” declared
Trump, “I am your retribution.” Pastor Charles Pace’s connection
of MAGA’s retribution themes with the religious dimensions of Deep
State imaginings (see the epigram above) fits with a revanchist
narrative of the movement’s origins.[
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But Bonnie Honig’s “Rambo Politics from Reagan to Trump” in the
January 7, 2020 _Boston Review_ takes an even deeper dive. Trump’s
instinct for “retributive payback,” she avers, lies in what she
calls “a fantasy of poetic justice” linking to “Trump as Rambo,
the Vietnam veteran and symbol of masculinity . . . who avenges
American humiliation.”

Honig avoids the simplicity of a Great Man kind of explanation,
writing that Trump’s desire to Ramboize himself “is not merely a
matter of personal vanity” because the Ramboesque narrative is “a
fundamental part of the Republican Party’s cultural politics.”

Contra the attribution of MAGA’s rise to Trump’s personal
magnetism or the influence of media figures such as Rush Limbaugh and
Pat Buchanan, then, an explanation with deeper historical roots
uncovers the resemblance between the Republican Party retributive
campaign themes and those that flared in interwar Europe.

Germany’s defeat in World War I registered as a humiliating loss of
racial and national pride with enough Germans that the Nazi’s
promise to avenge the losses was irresistible. The campaign of
retribution that followed alleged the war had been lost to betrayal at
home. Leftists, ethnic minorities, Jews, and homosexuals, all thought
to be stains on Arian greatness were targeted.

+++

When Donald Trump’s ultra-rightest Make American Great Again (MAGA)
movement ignited racist and authoritarian sentiments in the late
twenty teens, efforts to explain its popularity focused on recent and
superficial news and entertainment trends, leaving unaddressed the
cancer left by the lost war in Vietnam. Continued inattention to the
fountainhead of Trumpism cradled in the war’s wake portends a
post-Trump life for the MAGA movement.

But warning against the dangers of revanchism is not enough. MAGA
offers an alternative to the economic insecurity, political corrosion,
and cultural degradation that weighs heavily on Americans across the
ideological spectrum. But MAGA’s exit from the dismaying present
would take us out the back door of history to societal norms that
preexisted the modern era, ways of life dominated by loyalties to
figures with religious and martial authority.

The failure of the left to imagine a _front door_ out of the
country’s end-of-empire anomie is complicit in the appeal of
Trumpist nihilism. A left vision is needed, one that rejects both
MAGA’s apocalyptic impulse and the liberal establishment’s
campaigns to shore up its global perimeters (read Ukraine) while
narcotizing its minions with the spoils of empire (read consumer
capitalism) and the narcissism of identity politics.

The sketch of a front door is emerging in recent works such as Naomi
Klein’s _Doppelganger, _sections of which rethink the usefulness
of the very notion of the modern nation state and reassess the value
of state_less_ness; with imperialism driven by capitalism’s
imperative to _grow_, the minds daring to imagine planned _de_growth
(the July-August 2023 _Monthly Review_) model the kind of big
thinking we need more of; Michael Klare recasts the demilitarization
of the economy as a climate change issue charting, thereby, a course
for the alliances of environmental, peace, tax-payers, and some faith
groups (Michael Klare, “Say Goodbye to The Planet Earth”
at _tomdispatch.com_). The national chauvinism that is baked into
U.S. imperial culture can be muted by making a second language a
requirement for high school graduation – a reform that corporate
leaders with global interests could easily get behind.

Baby steps? Perhaps. But the political, cultural, and economic
adjustment to a post-empire world is going to be epical, a
many-decades-long transition out of modernism’s dead end and into a
future made from the conditions it bequeathed. We had best get
started.

NOTES

1. Susan Page, et al. “Poll shows Biden, Trump tied at 37%.”
Associated Press _Worcester Telegram & Gazette_ October 24, 2023.
See also: CNN Poll: GOP voters’ broad support for Trump holds, with
less than half seriously worried criminal charges will harm his 2024
chances | CNN Politics
[[link removed]]. ↑
[[link removed]]

2. Susan Faludi. 1991. _Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women_.
New York: Crown. ↑
[[link removed]]

3. Obama takes sides in the ‘spitting on vets’ debate – Los
Angeles Times (latimes.com)
[[link removed]].
See the _Political.com_ story on the
Trump-McCainexchange: [link removed]. ↑
[[link removed]]

4. Elaine May. 2017. _Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and
Abandoned Democracy. _New York: Basic Books. ↑
[[link removed]]

5. David Cortwright. 1975. _Soldiers in Revolt_. New York:
Anchor. ↑
[[link removed]]

6. Jerry Lembcke. 2010. _Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of
Betrayal. _Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ↑
[[link removed]]

7. John G. Schmitz. 1971. _The Viet Cong Front in The United States
of America. _Belmont, MA: Western Islands Press. ↑
[[link removed]]

8. Opinion | Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep
State’ – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[[link removed]]. ↑
[[link removed]]

9. Rick Perlstein. 2008. _Nixonland: The Rise of a President and The
Fracturing of America_. New York: Scribner. ↑
[[link removed]]

10. Umberto Eco. 2011. _The Prague Cemetery_. Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt: New York. ↑
[[link removed]]

11. Kirshman, Nisha. 2019. “The Illuminati Conspiracy Theory. _The
Ohio State University._ (The Illuminati Conspiracy Theory | The
Psychology of Extraordinary Beliefs (osu.edu)
[[link removed]]) ↑
[[link removed]]

12. Greg Grandin, “The Republicans Who Want to Invade
Mexico.” _New York Times_, November 1, 2023; William M. Welch and
Barbara Slavin, “Henry Kissinger dies at 100,” _USA Today_,
December 1, 2023. ↑
[[link removed]]

13. Antisemitic and Anti-Muslim Hate Speech Surges Across the
Internet – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[[link removed]]. ↑
[[link removed]]

14. Disgruntlement with the terms ending the war in Vietnam are
summarized in the _New York Times_ November 39, 2023 obituary for
Henry Kissinger who was instrumental in shaping those terms: Henry
Kissinger, Who Shaped U.S. Cold War History, Dies at 100 – The New
York Times (nytimes.com)
[[link removed]]. ↑
[[link removed]]

15. H. Bruce Franklin. 1992. _M.I.A. or Mythmaking in
America._ Lawrence Hill Books: Brooklyn, NY; Tom Wilber and Jerry
Lembcke. 2021. _Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to
America Today_. Monthly Review Press: New York. ↑
[[link removed]]

16. Michael Billig. 1995. _Banal Nationalism_. SAGE: New York. As a
cultural trope, “left behind” was supercharged by the _Left
Behind_ book series authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (Tyndale
House, 1995-2007). Christian fundamentalists propelled its apocalyptic
tale drawn from the Book of Revelation to chart-topping sales, with
three volumes reaching the _New York Times_ best-seller lists. ↑
[[link removed]]

17. At rally in Waco, Trump vows to destroy the ‘deep state’
(nbcnews.com)
[[link removed]]. ↑
[[link removed]]

_[JERRY LEMBCKE is the author of nine books including The Spitting
Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
[[link removed]] (NYU Press,
1998), Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal
[[link removed]] (UMass Press,
2010), and Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America
Today [[link removed]] (Monthly
Review Press, 2021. His The Cult of the Victim Veteran: MAGA Fantasies
in Lost-War America
[[link removed].]
came out with Routledge in July 2023. Jerry’s opinion pieces have
appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle,
and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He has been a guest on several
NPR programs including On the Media.]_

* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* MAGA
[[link removed]]
* GOP
[[link removed]]
* Republican Party
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
[[link removed]]
* 2024 Elections
[[link removed]]
* Vietnam War
[[link removed]]
* Vietnam Syndrome
[[link removed]]
* Make America Great Again
[[link removed]]
* Ronald Reagan
[[link removed]]
* Anti-Communism
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* Militarism
[[link removed]]
* U.S. militarism
[[link removed]]
* new cold war
[[link removed]]
* revanchism
[[link removed]]

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