Anders Stephanson in Sidecar:
When Donald Trump invoked ‘manifest destiny’ in his inaugural address, it was in its oldest meaning as territorial expansion: the predestined, God-given American right to claim and acquire new land – more extravagantly than ever in this case, by putting an American flag on Mars (a sop to Elon Musk). The term in this sense was coined in the hyper-expansionist 1840s, when the Union was poised to swallow up the territory from Texas to California in the southwest and Oregon in the northwest, the manifest destiny being ‘to overspread the continent’. Trump also pictured the nation restored under his leadership as brimming with ‘exceptionalism’, indeed ‘far more exceptional than ever before’. America, down in the dumps, would become even more of an American America, making it brilliantly adequate to its concept. His State of the Union peroration to Congress six weeks later predicted a glorious future for ‘the most dominant civilization in history’, now that ‘the unstoppable power of the American spirit’ had been recaptured.
These were occasions for rhetorical excess, to which Trump is inclined anyway. But I was nonetheless surprised by the reference. I didn’t have him down as much of an exceptionalist or for that matter a destinarian. To put the question in that way may indeed impute a coherence and depth to Trump’s politics that it doesn’t have. Scratch the surface and the ideological essence seems to be the person of Donald Trump himself. Whims, lies, cheats, illegalities, egocentrism, revenge, brutality, boundless cynicism and a whole slew of appalling prejudices – does this add up to a ‘position’? Scarcely so – it appears. And yet. . .
More here.
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