Yep, a dark history of America revived under Republican rule of Donald Trump …
End of the American dream? The dark history of ‘America first’ | The Guardian |
Sadly, the American dream is dead,” Donald Trump proclaimed when he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. It seemed an astonishing thing for a candidate to say; people campaigning for president usually glorify the nation they hope to lead, flattering voters into choosing them. But this reversal was just a taste of what was to come, as he revealed an unnerving skill at twisting what would be negative for anyone else into a positive for himself.
By the time he won the election, Trump had flipped much of what many people thought they knew about the US on its head. In his acceptance speech he again pronounced the American dream dead, but promised to revive it. We were told that this dream of prosperity was under threat, so much so that a platform of “economic nationalism” carried the presidency.
Reading last rites over the American dream was disquieting enough. But throughout the campaign, Trump also promised to put America first, a pledge renewed – twice – in his inaugural address. It was a disturbing phrase; think pieces on the slogan’s history began to sprout up, explaining that it stretches back to efforts to keep the US out of the second world war.
In fact, “America first” has a much longer and darker history than that, one deeply entangled with the country’s brutal legacy of slavery and white nationalism, its conflicted relationship to immigration, nativism and xenophobia.
More below the fold …
Gradually, the complex and often terrible tale this slogan represents was lost to mainstream history – but kept alive by underground fascist movements. “America first” is, to put it plainly, a dog whistle. The expression’s backstory seems at first to uncannily anticipate Trump and (at least some of) his supporters, but the truth is that eruptions of American conservative populism are nothing new – and “America first” has been associated with them for well over a century. This is merely the latest iteration of a powerful strain of populist demagoguery in American history, from president Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) to Louisiana senator Huey Long a century later – one that now extends to Trump.
The slogan appears at least as early as 1884, when a California paper ran “America First and Always” as the headline of an article about fighting trade wars with the British. The New York Times shared in 1891 “the idea that the Republican Party has always believed in”, namely: “America first; the rest of the world afterward”. The Republican party agreed, adopting the phrase as a campaign slogan by 1894.
○ Anti-Suffragists: America First and Always
○ Art Responds to Women’s Suffrage: Pro and Con
The GOP Is America’s Party of White Nationalism
This is how the Bannons and Kings view the modern world: The West is threatened by hordes of swarthy outsiders, especially Mexicans and Muslims, and they are lonely defenders of the white Christian race against this insidious threat. There is no evidence that Trump has given this matter as much thought as they have, but, based on his public pronouncements, he has reached similar conclusions. That helps to explain why the administration is building a border wall, expanding deportations, and trying to keep out citizens of as many Muslim countries as possible. This isn’t about fighting terrorism or crime; it’s about fighting changing demographics. And it’s premised on an unspoken assumption that only white Christians are true Americans; all others are “somebody else.”
How have immigration and citizenship changed in the U.S.?
Throughout the colonial period, migration to the American continent was an open process. The desire to create permanent settlements prevented the creation of immigration restrictions during the 17th and 18th centuries. It wasn’t until after America became its own independent nation that it began to grapple with issues of citizenship and immigration.
Who is an American?
From the beginning, America was an experiment. Never before had a nation been created from such a heterogeneous population. Individuals like Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur described the “American” in 1782 as European or the descendant of a European, which resulted in a “strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.” Crèvecoeur explained that it was common to find families where the “grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations… Here [in America] individuals of all nations are melted into a new race whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”[ 1]
○ Andrew Jackson, America’s Original Anti-Establishment Candidate
