By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.
From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.
– President Trump,
inaugural address, January 20, 2017
President Trump is something of a paradox. He roots
himself in nostalgia for yesteryear — “Make America great again!” — but is
remarkably unconcerned with history. He ransacks the past for rhetorical
baubles but declines to carry their historical baggage too.
In 2015, a Washington
Post reporter had to remind Trump that his use of the phrase “silent
majority” had Nixonian “overtones.” “Oh, is that why people stopped using [the
phrase]?” Trump replied. “Nobody thinks of Nixon. I don’t think of Nixon when I
think of the silent majority.”
He invokes the “forgotten man” as if he invented the
term, never indicating that it was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s central
themes.
His inaugural address made almost no reference to
American history. His populist rejection of the status quo and the
establishment suggests that he thinks the country is starting over at Year
Zero. Indeed, he repeated a standard campaign line that at least some
historians might quibble with: that he was elected by a “historic movement, the
likes of which the world has never seen before.”
Which brings us to “America first,” a slogan the
president seems to have first absorbed from a New York Times reporter trying to characterize the candidate’s positions.
As with “silent majority,” Trump refuses to accept what that term means to many
of the people who hear him use it.
Granted, it’s more complicated than mainstream
journalists would have you believe.
The America First Committee was founded in the spring of
1940 by isolationist students at Yale University and quickly became a major
national movement — though it was never the purely right-wing phenomenon many
claim. Many Republicans and conservatives supported it (including a
then-15-year-old William F. Buckley, who as an adult repudiated isolationism
and barred isolationists from the pages of National
Review).
But other allies in the isolationist or
“non-interventionist” cause included American Socialist party leader Norman
Thomas, liberal journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, and such progressive icons
Charles Beard, John Dewey, Joseph Kennedy, Bernard Baruch, and Progressive
party hero Robert La Follette. Though it’s true the German-American Bund had
opposed war, so did American pacifist organizations (until the Soviets told
them to change their position). Isolationism is a bipartisan American
tradition, and its defenders can claim George Washington’s farewell address as
proof of its pedigree.
The entire purpose of the America First Committee was to
keep FDR from dragging the U.S. into another European war. Given the still
fresh memory of the horror — both at home and abroad — of World War I, this
always struck me as a defensible if, in hindsight, wrong position.
The isolationists had largely fought FDR to a political
standstill until Pearl Harbor, which ended all debate. After the war, with the
full knowledge of Nazi crimes and years of domestic patriotic fervor, the term
“America first” took on a more sinister reputation in retrospect than it
deserved (influenced by FDR’s political vendettas against the isolationists
during the war). Some Jewish groups to this day unfairly consider it vague code
for “America should have let the Holocaust run its course.”
That Trump could so easily adopt “America first” without
being hobbled by its negative connotation was a political coup. He insists that
it’s just a catchphrase for prioritizing American interests. Even though the
term is both catnip and dog whistle to some of his more unsavory fans, I think
he’s sincere.
Still, my problem with Trump’s version of “America first”
isn’t his desire to do what is in America’s best interests — who could oppose
that? It’s how he defines America’s best interest — and its best self. With his
blind eye to the past, he’s stumbled into old-fashioned nationalism.
Up until very recently, American exceptionalism — i.e.,
we are a creedal nation dedicated to certain principles reflected in our
founding documents — largely defined the conservative understanding of
patriotism.
Trump, however, sees America more as an identity than an
idea. He promised that America’s example “will shine for everyone to follow,”
but he defined that example not in terms of our liberties or ideals, but in
terms of unity. We will rebuild “our country with American hands and American
labor” following “two simple rules: buy American and hire American.” We will
shine through our success at building infrastructure, walling off our economy,
and crushing our enemies.
All in all, this is no “new vision” — though it is
arguably new for an American president.
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