An artifact of the totalitarian mind, cultural revolution serves in various guises to carry control beyond formal legal and political structures into the fabric of everyday life. As it feeds upon its successes, the limitless urge to dye everything one color ends either in counter-revolution, as in China, or petrification, as in North Korea.

At present the United States is in the midst of its own idiosyncratic cultural revolution, which, like all others, is differentiated—as are hurricanes—by the nature of the waters from which it draws its energy. Though the feedstock of China’s convulsions was unlike our own, some similarities are worth noting.

In August 1966, Mao Zedong mobilized high school and university students for the purposes of purifying revolutionary ideology, doubling down on and concealing its failures, purging non-conformists, establishing a cult of personality, and eliminating the “capitalist roaders” who threatened his control of the party.

Shortly before his election, Barack Obama (who, to this day enjoys a nauseating savior cult explicable by nothing except perhaps mass hypnosis) declared, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” and, later, in his First Inaugural, “We will transform our schools and colleges and universities.” Succeeding only