Who offers more spectacle, DeSantis or Trump? I studied Chinese history at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. Somewhere I have some artifacts from the period’s inescapable propaganda. Even without that background, it was clear without squinting where this column on “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution” by Tania Branigan would go by about one and a half sentences in (New York Times): It would seem impossible to forget or minimize the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, resulted in an estimated 1.6 million to two million deaths and scarred a generation and its descendants. The movement, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership sought to purge Chinese society of all remaining non-Communist elements, upended nearly every hallowed institution and custom. Teachers and schools long held in esteem were denounced. Books were burned and banned, museums ransacked, private art collections destroyed. Intellectuals were tortured. Subtle. Or maybe not. But I had not made the connection before to what political and religious extremists in this country fantasize of imposing: a cultural makeover “as totalizing in scope as the Cultural Revolution.” Wrong-thinking bureaucrats purged. Racial minorities again bowing and scraping. Women internally exiled — barefoot, pregnant, and confined to domestic chores. Gender nonconformists forced back into the closets where they belong. The educated brought low and/or forcibly re-educated, the rest indoctinated in right-think. Non-Christian faiths tolerated so long as memberships remain low, inconspicuous and undemanding. And guns. Lots of guns. It is harder to buy the comparison when the…