Trump pushed an “America First” dogma, but the slogan pre-dated him by nearly a century. Isolationists tried to pretend that the U.S. could exist by itself without regard to the well-being of the rest of the world. They believed we could get away with being selfish.
Also, that was the English language translation of Hitler’s slogan, “Deutschland uber alles,” which meant Germany over everybody else.
Selfishness and contempt for other people are morally wrong for reasons any decent person should immediately understand. The “America First” dogma leads directly to cruelty toward other nations.
The “America First” dogma also leads directly to the U.S.’s mania for militarily dominating the rest of the world — and even willing to destroy the world in a nuclear war, even though the nuclear war would destroy the U.S. too. Clear, logical thinking is not an aspect of the “America First” dogma.
Trump and other “America First” true-believers assume that the U.S. can pollute the atmosphere with historically unprecedentedly huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane without the climate disruption causing chaos in the U.S. too.
They also believe that during a global pandemic we should hoard the vaccines in the U.S. and let American Big Pharma corporations profit hugely from their patents instead of letting other nations produce the vaccines and saving lives in other countries. Those “America Firsters” do not realize that in our modern “global village” we Americans will get sick and die when people in other nations catch and suffer from and transmit this very highly communicable disease.
IT IS NOT ONLY THE TRUMPISTS — IT IS NEARLY ALL POLITICIANS AND MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA that assume that the U.S. somehow deserves to run the world. “American exceptionalism” is a fatally egocentric assumption that the U.S. is exempt from obeying international law, and the U.S. is exempt from the laws of science, and the U.S. can do any damned thing it wants and still be honored and obeyed by the rest of the world.
TRUMP IS NOT THE ONLY NARCISSIST. Narcissism is baked into American political culture.
We need to understand our actual role in the world. We need to practice compassion and fairness. We need healing.
The peace movement, the environmental and climate movements, the movement for racial justice, and the progressive movement overall need to understand the problems and strategize how to solve them in truly profound ways.
