For ye have the Know Nothings always with you
Rather than look backwards 21 years on this September 11th, let’s look back even further.
Sarah Churchwell is a professor of American literature at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. The author of “Behold America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream,'” Churchwell examines Trumpism after Trump and America’s recurring flirtation with keeping out the undesirables.
Great gosh a’mighty, a host of insurrectionist refugees from the Trump administration are setting up America First think tanks and foundations and (oh, my) organizations aimed at curtailing legal immigration — even an “America-first education” academy for parents who want their kids uncontaminated by foreign ideas like the theory of relativity and, one supposes, democracy.
Churchwell writes:
Phrases like the “American Dream” and the “melting pot” are commonly used today to describe ideas about American identity and inclusivity, but it’s “America First” that has been more closely associated with debates about inclusivity generally and immigration specifically — and for much longer.
The “American Dream,” for example, first appeared in American political conversations at the turn of the 20th century, to argue against the divisiveness created by wealth inequality. Among the earliest uses of the phrase I’ve found was in a nationally syndicated article in 1900 called “Rich Men and Democracy,” arguing that every republic in history was endangered not by disgruntled ordinary citizens but by “discontented multi-millionaires,” because they are “very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality.” Submitting to wealthy elites’ divisive demands for special privileges would mark “the end of the American dream,” because that dream was one of democratic parity and equality of opportunity.
By contrast, “America First” emerged much earlier — aptly enough, during the original nativist movement of the 1850s, when the Native American or American Party (nicknamed the Know Nothings) formed to defend what its members considered the nation’s “real” Protestant culture from the threat of immigrant Catholicism.
America Firstism has a long history through which Churchwell walks readers, much of it a century ago influenced by “eugenicist ideas of racial purity and the ethnic superiority of White Europeans over everyone else.” Nazism managed to discredit those notions for a few decades as a desire among Americans grew for “doctrines of liberal democracy and inclusivity.” But, like Michael Myers, it’s hard to keep nativism in its grave for long.
With the yawning wealth inequality of Gilded Age 2.0, America Firstism and “discontented multi-[b]illionaires” are back.
White nationalism, and the specifically white Christian nationalism the decidedly un-Christian Trump saw and exploited for his own aggrandizement, is resurgent once again, kick-started by the presence of a black man in the White House. And by brown migrants from south of the border, as Trump, Stephen Miller, and Fox News made sure to remind us at every opportunity.
Now the America First Policy Institute declares that its slogan is “America First, Always” and that its immigration policy will mean no longer putting “America last” — echoing the language of a March 1922 editorial from what was then the nation’s most popular weekly, the Saturday Evening Post,as it harangued its readers about the “immigration problem” caused by “our policy of putting the alien and his interests first, and America last.”
These “America First” initiatives go beyond attempts at excluding the “alien” that were already divisive, and futile, a century ago. One of the most prominent spokesmen for “America First” today is Nicholas Fuentes, a white Christian nationalist who organized the America First Political Action Conference earlier this year. Fuentes was also present at the storming of the Capitol, as were his “Groyper” followers, waving his “AF” flags. Fuentes declared: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world.” That is certainly what “America First” has meant in the past, as its leaders promise that only they can put America first, by inflaming divisions against nearly every other human being. But it is “America First” that endures, not its erstwhile leaders — and its history offers a pretty good indication of what to expect from Trumpism without Trump.
Better than Trumpism with Trump. But not by much.
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