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Traditionally, America has seen itself as standing for goodness, morality, doing the right thing, Democracy, etc… Most of the voters have, at least.
That’s extremely debatable. If anything, it’s the politicians who pretend to see it that way moreso than the voters. That’s why Trump became a thing.
Now maybe America has sometimes acted like this in the past, but Trump openly stating it is new.
Sometimes??
If you want to talk about “traditionally” and “new,” that depends on what time scale you’re talking about. Like, I suppose when the US was colonizing the Philippines it was nominally in the name of “democracy” (but of course those savages aren’t ready for democracy yet, so we’ll just manage things for a bit, while we take their resources and put in a naval base), but Trump is also nominally talking about “liberating” Iran. WWII was explicitly justified in terms of protecting the national interest, rather than humanitarianism.
In the post-WWII era, some people recognized the importance of soft power in maintaining the global empire we’d acquired, and for countering Soviet narratives, so extra effort was put into these pretences. Sure, we’d still go around invading poor countries like Vietnam, committing mass slaughter and bombing them back to the stone age, but it was in the name of “democracy.” While that was happening, the CIA was also overthrowing democratically elected leaders around the world and propping up dictators who could more easily be bribed to keep the resources flowing, and we didn’t have to worry about justifying any of that because the government could just lie about it.
The problem with all this propaganda is that it kind of worked too well. People thought that committing mass slaughter of the Vietnamese and dropping Agent Orange on them and propping up a puppet dictator was all done for their benefit. And when it failed spectacularly and got a ton of people killed, a lot of people took the lesson of “we need to stop helping anyone ever again.”
That’s why when Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, he was so insistent that “this is not a nation-building exercise.” All of the early rhetoric was quite emphatic that we were not going there to help anyone or build democracy, it was just about “finding the killers.”
Low and behold, despite what the American public wanted, it did turn into a nation-building exercise. And low and behold, just like Vietnam, people didn’t appreciate us slaughtering them and bombing weddings and stealing their resources, so it was yet another failure in the “helping people” category.
As public dissatisfaction grew and grew, as the bodies stacked higher and higher, the establishment of both parties refused to bend. Trump seized on that dissisfaction and promised an alternative and received so much popular support that the Republican establishment couldn’t stop him.
Of course, Trump was merely seizing on that dissatisfaction for his own benefit as an opportunist, and the only real difference he offers is peeling away the ridiculous pretences that other politicians have paid lip service to, while doing the same shit of starting wars everywhere.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were delighted at this development because they believed there was a large contingent of center-right people who still believed in and valued these silly pretences. They were proven wrong twice. That Vietnam-Afghanistan “nation building” “spreading democracy” bullshit has clearly become discredited in the public consciousness. This is not something that’s Trump created or that will go away once he’s gone.
That’s extremely debatable. If anything, it’s the politicians who pretend to see it that way moreso than the voters. That’s why Trump became a thing.
Sometimes??
If you want to talk about “traditionally” and “new,” that depends on what time scale you’re talking about. Like, I suppose when the US was colonizing the Philippines it was nominally in the name of “democracy” (but of course those savages aren’t ready for democracy yet, so we’ll just manage things for a bit, while we take their resources and put in a naval base), but Trump is also nominally talking about “liberating” Iran. WWII was explicitly justified in terms of protecting the national interest, rather than humanitarianism.
In the post-WWII era, some people recognized the importance of soft power in maintaining the global empire we’d acquired, and for countering Soviet narratives, so extra effort was put into these pretences. Sure, we’d still go around invading poor countries like Vietnam, committing mass slaughter and bombing them back to the stone age, but it was in the name of “democracy.” While that was happening, the CIA was also overthrowing democratically elected leaders around the world and propping up dictators who could more easily be bribed to keep the resources flowing, and we didn’t have to worry about justifying any of that because the government could just lie about it.
The problem with all this propaganda is that it kind of worked too well. People thought that committing mass slaughter of the Vietnamese and dropping Agent Orange on them and propping up a puppet dictator was all done for their benefit. And when it failed spectacularly and got a ton of people killed, a lot of people took the lesson of “we need to stop helping anyone ever again.”
That’s why when Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, he was so insistent that “this is not a nation-building exercise.” All of the early rhetoric was quite emphatic that we were not going there to help anyone or build democracy, it was just about “finding the killers.”
Low and behold, despite what the American public wanted, it did turn into a nation-building exercise. And low and behold, just like Vietnam, people didn’t appreciate us slaughtering them and bombing weddings and stealing their resources, so it was yet another failure in the “helping people” category.
As public dissatisfaction grew and grew, as the bodies stacked higher and higher, the establishment of both parties refused to bend. Trump seized on that dissisfaction and promised an alternative and received so much popular support that the Republican establishment couldn’t stop him.
Of course, Trump was merely seizing on that dissatisfaction for his own benefit as an opportunist, and the only real difference he offers is peeling away the ridiculous pretences that other politicians have paid lip service to, while doing the same shit of starting wars everywhere.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were delighted at this development because they believed there was a large contingent of center-right people who still believed in and valued these silly pretences. They were proven wrong twice. That Vietnam-Afghanistan “nation building” “spreading democracy” bullshit has clearly become discredited in the public consciousness. This is not something that’s Trump created or that will go away once he’s gone.