Ethno-national imperialism
The president, in the words of an old TV commercial, is a chocolate mess. He held a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday backed by a banner reading “Lower Prices Bigger Paychecks.” He was there to connect with Americans seeing higher prices on every grocery store aisle and paychecks that haven’t increased and buy less. Instead he bragged that he’s ended inflation and lowered prices. One could say he lost the plot but it was never his plot:
He mocked the word “affordability,” touted how high the stock market had risen, and said Americans didn’t need so many pencils. He launched into a number of digressions to disparage the country of Somalia, the concept of climate change and the news media in the back of the room.
It’s a lesson Americans have been slow to learn. Don’t listen to what Trump says, watch what he does.
He hates neoconservatives, Adam Serwer lays out in The Atlantic. He’s mocked them and their mismanagement of military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, “though more in the tone of a fan angry about his team losing than of a principled opponent of militarism.”
Now with respect to his project for regime change in Venezuela, Trump is running the neocon playbook.
Serwer writes:
Like the neocons, Trump’s neo-neocons repeatedly invoke the West’s complacency and unwillingness to defend its own values, a frailty that can be rectified only through the ritual use of military force against weaker targets. The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg once articulated what he called the “Ledeen Doctrine,” after the neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which was: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Despite Trump’s rejection of George W. Bush, MAGA bears many similarities to the right-wing politics of that era—a fetishization of violence and torture, the treatment of opposition as treasonous, a disdain for due process, and an anti-Muslim bigotry at odds with fundamental American principles.
But not at odds with what for Trump passes for principles. More like a schoolyard bully’s need for domination.
Although the pretense of adhering to democratic values has been abandoned by an administration that disdains democracy, free speech, and the rule of law, the theory is nonetheless the same: Unless America defends ethno-nationalism against the forces of multiracial democracy elsewhere, ethno-nationalism will not be safe here. The Trump administration’s rabid hostility toward the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa, with its history all Americans can recognize, makes more sense in this context.
Some neocons actually believed in democratic principles, Serwer suggests, albeit “in their own misguided way.” Some of those became Never Trumpers. “But for others, the appeal of interventionism seems to have been more about a kind of ethnic chauvinism, about reiterating the superiority of the enlightened West over primitivist ‘Islamofascism.’ For that faction of former neocons, well, Trumpism fit like a well-tailored suit.”
Despite his condemnation of the neocons, what Trump really condemns are their failures. Their failure to subdue Iraq and Afghanistan (and Syria) overnight, as he would have, and to take their oil. (Venezuela has lots of oil.) Trumpism means not only to nurture ethnic chauvinism at home but to export it the way the neocons did, minus the pretext of exporting democracy.
Serwer wraps up:
The Trump administration’s strategy document states that “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” Trump has made clear that this is no anodyne statement—at a rally Tuesday he defended his “permanent pause” on “third-world migration” by expressing his dismay at the fact that instead of people coming from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, immigrants were coming to the U.S. from “Somalia, places that are a disaster, filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Trump is not concerned about “migration”; in some general sense, he’s concerned that the immigrants are not white.
This is the “Great Replacement” theory, applied globally. It is the same might-makes-right worldview of the worst neocons, but in service of the abhorrent principle of segregation instead of democracy, and suggesting a future of American imperialism unmoored from any pretense of a belief in the equality of mankind.
Trump the Incurious may have a deep preference for the skin tones (genes) of Nordic peoples. But he will never ask himself why more of them don’t want to join an American oligarcy in decline. They are happier in the social democracies they’ve built than they would be in the Trump-Miller-Vought white-nationalist project.
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