What Will we Fall For (Hamilton)
I write a lot, (about 1600 essays since 2017, maybe a million and a half words), and I read a lot too. And recently I’ve read “messages” from Europe. While there is occasional resentment of America (even that term: that “we” are Americans, while Canada, on the same continent, are Canadians), there is also admiration. The United States took on the challenge of world peace for more than half a century. Sure that often made Americans arrogant, the bull in the China shop, but in the end, the United States was “on the line” for the Western World.
And that continued across party lines; from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon. Regardless of Democrat or Republican, US commitment was clear. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, America transitioned to the new world threat, radical extremism. It took a fierce shot to the American head, 9-11, to make it clear that there was no defense like a good offense in that battle. And to my liberal friends, that doesn’t justify the “stupid” wars, like Vietnam and Iraq, nor the loss of rights in the “Patriot Act”. That was American arrogance, not protection.
So Europe could depend on two things: protection and arrogance. It was a reasonable trade-off. Until the rise of Donald Trump. Now, many Europeans are worried about America.
America First
To be clear, Donald Trump is an opportunist, not a creator. He is not the originator of the “MAGA” philosophy, echoing the discredited 1930’s “America First” isolationist movement. No one can conclude that isolationism, a concept that didn’t work in the relatively simple time of the mid-twentieth century, will work in our current intertwined world. The computer I’m typing on now was made in China, and the car I drive manufactured in Toledo, Ohio, with parts shipped in from Korea, Mexico, and Canada. We can phone India, video Russia, or even chat with Nepal, at the touch of a keyboard. The entire world is literally in our pocket. Isolationism today makes as much sense as pretending the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. It does.
The Trump Presidency shook the world’s confidence in American commitment. And much of the world gave a great sigh of relief when Joe Biden gained the Presidency. It wasn’t that Biden is some “dynamic” leader. To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s memorably comment to Dan Quayle: “Biden is no Jack Kennedy”. But Biden represents a calm return to America’s role in the world since 1941. Even his age is appropriate: Biden understands what the United States is supposed to do, because he literally lived it.
So a United States still in disarray, three years after Biden defeated Trump, rattles the rest of the Western World to the core. The fall of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker is, “…all in all, it’s just another piece of the wall” (wow, I’m down to Pink Floyd lyrics!!). Europeans looking for evidence of the “fall” of the “Pax Americana”, need look no farther.
Righteous Might
Except I really don’t believe that. This is not the end of the “American Century”. This is a part of a regular cycle in American life; one that we’ve seen throughout our recent history. Teddy Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson all contributed to making the US a world power. Then after World War I, the Nation pulled back from world involvement, first in the twenties, then even more during the Great Depression. But Franklin Roosevelt led America to fight against Fascism with, as he said, our “Righteous Might”.
And soon after that victory at war, America “retrenchment” became evident in the McCarthy era. That’s our “dark secret”: teachers were muzzled, language altered. The baseball Cincinnati Reds became the “Red-Legs” for a decade; they couldn’t be just “Reds”, that was Communist! We even changed the “Pledge of Allegiance”, adding the “…under God” part, to differentiate from atheistic Communists (1954). McCarthyism is echoed in today’s world; ask your local history teacher whether they have “open discussions” about current events anymore. If they’re honest, you’ll hear it’s too “dangerous”, not just for classroom order, but to keep their job.
Ultimately McCarthyism fell through its own weight in dishonesty. By the 1960’s America was “back” again. But we had crises of conscience in Vietnam, corruption during Watergate, and confidence during the Iran hostage era. And we needed military “successes” to reassure ourselves we weren’t failures. The “grand” invasions of Granada (1983) and Panama (1989) “proved” that we were “back again”. We put a final stamp on our victories as we watched General Schwarzkopf lead American troops to mop-up Iraq in the first Persian Gulf War.
New Seeds, New Struggles
And with that invasion, we inadvertently planted the seeds for the next generation’s struggle. Radical extremists attacks were already a part of America’s experience, 241 Americans killed in the barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983. But it became more evident with the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, where retribution was hampered by the moral/political crisis of Bill Clinton’s behavior. And then it was onto George Bush, and 9-11, and the “…whole world hearing” what America’s might could do.
Our “righteous might” led us into Afghanistan, and our political hubris led us into Iraq again. Perhaps it was the revulsion at what those wars did to us, and more importantly did to our children, that set America up for the “MAGA” agenda we face now.
So what’s next? America will find its way out of our current complexity. It’s already happening: we are holding responsible those who tried to subvert our democratic traditions. They aren’t going “quietly”, but they are going. The process even demonstrates a positive of the American system; what the Federal Courts can’t get, the State Courts are. And the same is true in the US Congress. It’s not “pretty”, and it’s not efficient. But it is a part of a “cycle”: as American as the Pledge of Allegiance or baseball. We’ll be back.
