Image by Maria Thalassinou.
The Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada, Gaza. Each time Trump hints at taking over a territory, he taps into an American myth synonymous with violence and self-righteous entitlement: Manifest Destiny.
Early in the nineteenth century, John Quincy Adams wrote: “The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation.” [1] In 1832, Massachusetts Congressman Francis Baylies argued for pushing America’s borders out to the Pacific Ocean. “To diffuse the arts of life, the light of science, and the blessings of the Gospel over a wilderness, is no violation of the laws of God,” Baylies proclaimed. “The stream of bounty which perpetually flows from the throne of the Almighty,” he added, “ought not to be obstructed in its course.” [2] As Adams and Baylies saw it, America’s expansion was in accordance with God’s work and God’s will; it was destined.
A decade later, in the July–August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, editor John L. O’Sullivan published an unsigned article about the annexation of Texas. It was in this article that the phrase “manifest destiny” first appeared in public. The article spoke of America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” [3] This time the concern was not spreading civilization, science, or Christianity, but providing the American population with land for unrestrained growth and development. Again, it was justified as a task God given, God driven, and God blessed.
Writing in the New York Morning News in December 1845, O’Sullivan advocated for the acquisition of the Oregon Territory on the same basis: “Away, away with all these cobweb tissues of rights of discovery, exploration, settlement, contiguity, etc.” he wrote. “To state the truth at one in its naked simplicity. . . our claim to Oregon . . . is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us.” [4]
In Providence and the Invention of the United States 1607–1876, historian Nicholas Guyatt notes that over time “national providentialism” in America transformed into a strategy for achieving concrete political goals. [5] Built upon a mythic belief that fused an understanding of nationalism, independence, growth, and divine virtue, American expansion did not allow for questions, restraint, or protest.
Louisiana. California. Nevada. Arizona. New Mexico. Texas. Oregon. Deceitful officials and fraudulent treaties steered acquisition. Exploitation, corruption, violence, and oppression ensued.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, historian Frederick Jackson Turner explained that westward movement, which was fundamental to American civilization and its development, was enabled by free lands, or the wilderness. The acquisition of western lands, however, alongside urbanization and industrialization across the continent, caused this wilderness to disappear bit by bit. America was about to confront a new challenge, Turner predicted, “the closing of the frontier.” [6]
If Manifest Destiny was a divine mandate, how could it be trumped by territorial limitations? As if to find an answer to this disconcerting question, the U.S. embarked on a quest for expansion beyond the continent, beyond the literal wilderness. As historian James Oliver Robertson put it:
Whether it was “taking up the white man’s burden,” providing “oil for the lamps of China,” freeing Cuba from Spain, “making the world safe for democracy,” bringing the Four Freedoms to the world, “saving the Western Democracies,” or “nation-building” in Vietnam, America’s mission, her errand into the wilderness, [had] become—with the disappearance of American wilderness—something to be carried out in the larger wilderness which [was] not-America. [7]
From there, the wilderness became a metaphor for “those places and peoples and nations on earth which America [perceived] to be without democracy, without liberty, without independence, without the possibility of the individual pursuit of happiness,” [8] Robertson explained. With America restless and relentless, the frontier continued to move farther across deserts and oceans. This expansion was not always accomplished through conquest and colonization, but also through industrial, technological, and military means and ideological processes.
Puerto Rico. Guam. The U.S. Virgin Islands. American Samoa. The Northern Mariana Islands. Today these unincorporated territories are inhabited by U.S. citizens who cannot vote in presidential elections, have limited representation in Congress and circumscribed self-governance, and are excluded from important federal programs and tax provisions. They can only benefit from selective constitutional protections. To this list of colonies one can add the U.S. government’s military bases and operations around the world, resource and labor management, economic control, political interventions, and cultural influence.
There is nothing new about the path Trump seeks from isolationism to imperialism. What is new is that Trump does not hide behind messianic or missionary rhetoric and does not feel any need for moral justification. No more claims to civilizing the savages through Christianity or education and science. No more spreading democracy and promoting free markets. No more liberation. Trump is not one for political correctness. Out with the providential thinking, too. The U.S. is gearing up to expand further not because of America’s God-given exceptionalism but because of Trump’s personal grandiosity and self-indulgence.
“The greatest danger to mankind is not a new weapon, but the human psyche itself,” warned Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. “Without myth, we are directionless, but with the wrong myth, we are dangerous.”
With each executive order, it is as if Trump is speaking O’Sullivan’s nineteenth-century language: Away, away with all these cobwebs of rules of law, democracy, diplomacy, human rights… Condominiums to casinos to golf courses, to the Riviera of the Middle East and even Mars, Trump believes that it is his own Manifest Destiny to expand.
Whether he knowingly exploits a national myth or is personally possessed by it, and is thus lost in a grandiose delusion, does not matter. What matters now is political submission and public acceptance. Taking the myth for granted. Normalizing tyranny and violence. Witnessing without protest. Numbing ourselves. It is with this collective indifference, this ignorance, that we are most dangerous.
Notes
[1] John Quincy Adams quoted in Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1777 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
[2] Francis Baylies quoted in James Oliver Robertson, American Myth American Reality (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), 72.
[3] John L. O’Sullivan quoted in Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 106.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[6] For more information see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).
[7] Robertson, 123.
[8] Ibid., 124.
