Donald Trump keeps invoking the ‘manifest destiny’ of America to rule the Western Hemisphere, thereby using a stock phrase in the lexicon of American exceptionalism.
For Trump, manifest destiny means that America answers only to an authority infinitely higher than silly international laws or impotent defence alliances. This makes the US a simulacrum of old kingdoms whose absolute monarchs ruled by divine right.
Such monarchs always said they were accountable to God only, meaning, in earthly terms, to no one. In a clear echo of such sentiments, Trump said the other day that he recognises no constraints other than his own morality. That was something Louis XIV or Nicholas I could have claimed, except that they probably would also have mentioned God in that context.
The tendency to express the nature of the US in quasi-religious terms didn’t start with Trump. It goes back to that Mayflower passenger, John Winthrop, who borrowed a phrase from St Matthew to describe America as a divinely ordained “city on a hill”.
The Biblical phrase immediately entered American lore and there it remains to this day. The underlying spirit cuts across party lines: the phrase was used by both the arch-Democrat John Kennedy and the arch-Republican Ronald Reagan. In other words, America isn’t just different from all other countries; it is saintlier and therefore better.
While other lands amble aimlessly through life, it’s America’s right and duty to carry out a messianic mission by spreading the ideals of liberalism, democracy, democratic liberalism, liberal democracy, republicanism or any other voguish political term denoting the underlying virtue.
In 1809 Jefferson expressed the principle of America as a beacon without relying on biblical references: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”
Tastes differ but facts shouldn’t: America was not “the only monument… and the sole depository… of freedom and self-government”. England, among others, had form in those areas too. But then the puffery of political pietism knows no bounds.
In due course the ‘city on a hill’ was helped along by other similar claims. In the 1840s the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ so beloved of Trump. Said manifest destiny was according to him “divine”: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.
That God-like mission entailed the worldwide enforcement of the inalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Already at that early date the impression was conveyed, for the time being obliquely, that America’s founding documents were binding not just for herself but also for the unsuspecting outside world. If all those countries didn’t realise what was good for them, it was up to America to teach them – and chastise them if they played truant.
Never in the history of the world, at least not since the heyday of Rome, had there existed another nation so bursting with such refreshingly sanctimonious arrogance. The world had to wait until the twentieth century for the American antithetical doppelgänger to appear: Soviet Russia on her own messianic crusade. The differences between the two are obvious enough, but the similarities are just as telling, if less commented upon.
The two messianic countries tucked away at the periphery of Christendom had both a positive and a negative constituent to their aspirations. While their positive aspirations differed, their negative desiderata were identical: the repudiation of the old order, otherwise known as European civilisation.
(“Repudiation of Europe,” Ezra Pound once said, “is the raison d’être of America.”)
America was more successful in achieving her positive aim of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ (it was more achievable to begin with, for being more pragmatic), understandably so. A seducer, after all, is likely to run up a higher amatory score than a rapist. It remains to be seen which of the two will repudiate Europe more decisively — it’s a close race at the moment.
To reinforce the quasi-religious aspects of their self-worship, both countries borrowed their iconography from various creeds, either pagan or faux Christian.
In ghoulish mimicry of Christian relics, for example, the ‘uncorrupted’ body of Lenin still lies in its mausoleum, minus the erstwhile mile-long queues of worshippers. Rumours used to be spread that Soviet scientists were working on ways to bring Lenin’s body back to life, and every Soviet city, town or village was adorned with posters screaming “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will always live!”. The mass murderer was a simulacrum of Jesus Christ.
Many have commented on the perverse references to religion in Bolshevik iconography, but few have noticed that the same mimicry is also robust in America.
Hardly any speech by American leaders from the eighteenth century onwards has omitted quasi-religious references to canonised historical figures, whose deeds are routinely described in Biblical terms. “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence,” pronounced John Quincy Adams, and he meant it exactly as it sounded.
Sacral visual imagery also abounds, as do mock-religious shrines to past leaders. Mount Rushmore with its 60-foot likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved in granite is an obligatory site for American pilgrimages.
George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as ‘Great Father of the Country’. The interior of the Capitol dome in DC displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan gods, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.
In the same vein, the Lincoln Memorial is designed as a Greek temple and is actually identified as such in marble: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”
The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching that: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? … Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”
It is useful to remember that these ringing words were uttered by a man who had his chattel slaves flogged to mincemeat for trying to escape. Jefferson also openly despised every Christian dogma and sacrament. His statement would therefore be either hypocritical or downright cynical if we were to forget that by then ‘God’ had become the shorthand for ‘America’.
To emulate the God of the Scriptures, the American deity has to claim creative powers. God Mark I may or may not have created the world, but it’s definitely up to God Mark II to recreate it.
One of America’s spiritual fathers, Thomas Paine, said as much. In his revolutionary gospel Common Sense Paine thundered off his pulpit that: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…”.
Thus from the beginning American patriotism took on certain characteristics that until then had been more commonly associated with love of God, not of one’s country. And new patriotism began to claim precedence over old morality.
This isn’t to say that no true religious spirit existed in America – it did, and at the time it was still virile. But that residual piety had no role to play in the day-to-day running of the new republic.
For American politicians the Bible wasn’t so much a guide to their activities as an inexhaustible source of spiffy phrases, a precursor to the Roget’s Thesaurus of Quotations. Real life was driven by the unreal religion, one based not on a God worshipped but on a country deified.
That’s why many observers on this side of the Atlantic are wrong when believing that Trump is sui generis. In fact, he drinks from the founding and historical sources of the American psyche, appealing powerfully to those in whom those sources continue to gush.
Unlike traditional, organically developed European countries, America was built on an ideology, and any ideology is a secular faith. That’s why the US appears as enigmatic to an average Englishman or Spaniard as Russia seemed to Winston Churchill.
Such people don’t realise that an American is defined not only by culture, language and national allegiance, but also by a form of neo-pagan piety, a secular cult that’s a simulacrum of Christian messianism. Some Americans are passionately devout exponents of this totemistic cult, some less so.
Trump genuflects before that totem pole with what may or may not be genuine devotion. One way or the other, he knows how to speak to true believers in their own language, and that’s what makes him an electoral success.
Yet it also makes him unacceptable to those who kneel at different altars, both literal and figurative. Europeans are happy to welcome America as an ally, even sometimes as a role model. But they’ll always resent and resist a hectoring, bullying America, as personified by Trump. This sort of thing doesn’t travel well.