From Wokeness to America First
The parallel lines of the horseshoe's ends
The second administration of Donald Trump is not three months old, yet the world has been screaming in disbelief. The tariffs against friendly countries, the executive orders, the public chiding against the president of Ukraine, the intention to take Canada and Greenland, and the rest.
Average Republicans are divided. Some who I know said they never voted for him anyway. Some are disappointed. Some proudly say, “I voted for this”. Not exactly for the price of eggs, but for the deportation of convicted criminals, for the end of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in offices, and a proud America.
What does Trump want? He might be just crazy as usual. It’s his art of the deal, to make outrageous demands and work on negotiations. He’s a Russian asset, no more complicated than that. He resurrects the pre-1945 isolationism, America First.
And yet, Canadians say that there’s nothing isolationist about threatening to annex Canada to Greenland. There’s nothing isolationist about coveting Gaza. Isn’t it always more profitable for America to be a good friend and benign protector? More curiously, if he’s not a Moscow plant, why is his administration denigrating all American-built institutions and American allies?
I knew about American isolationism when studying the Second World War, as exemplified by Charles Lindbergh, more famous as the first American who crossed the Atlantic by air. Back then I thought the isolationists were Nazi sympathizers, and yet Lindbergh participated in the Pacific War against Japan and reinvented himself as a conservationist and friend of American presidents. I also attempted to explain to any 14-year-old who cared why the US refused to join the League of Nations, despite its being the creation of Woodrow Wilson.
I was particularly interested by the America First ideology following Mrs. America, where I studied the biographies of the main characters and found out that Phyllis Schlafly had been an isolationist throughout her life. She supported Robert A. Taft for the 1952 Republican National Convention, who championed American retreat from Western Europe. Let Europe defend itself, said Taft, as America had all the rockets and airplanes to protect its shores.
His supporters including Schlafly believed Taft was robbed in the 1952 Republican National Convention and Eisenhower arranged a meeting with Taft where Eisenhower agreed to his demand to stop socialism in the United States and to limit federal spending (Eisenhower drew the line at abandoning NATO), and Taft became the Senate Majority Leader before died from pancreatic cancer in 1953.
After Taft’s death, Schlafly moved to Barry Goldwater, an assimilated Jewish American who was a champion of desegregation in Arizona. At the 1964 RNC, Goldwater was supported by Ronald Reagan, whose “A Time for Choosing” speech used the same keyword as Schlafly’s self-published book, A Choice not an Echo.
The book defends Taft, a victim of Republican conspiracies since 1940, and the echo here referred to candidates preferred by what she called the “Eastern Establishment”. Goldwater and Reagan, coupled with the assassination of JFK and the civil rights movement, might have turned the Grand Old Party from a northeastern industrialists’ party into a working-class party by 1964.
Mrs. America teaches me the two different factions of the Republican Party, represented in the 1970s by the neoconservatives represented by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ford and the paleoconservatives, represented by Reagan and Schlafly, especially after she founds the Eagle Forum and gather other conservative women and religious men to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly never trusted Kissinger, and even late in the series puts him in the same group as the feminists Steinem and Freidan, without saying the J word.
Reagan became the president, and the miniseries concludes with Reagan calling back Schlafly, saying he doesn’t need her. Reagan certainly had his own Mrs. Americas, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Sandra Day O’Connor. Reagan was not an isolationist and his aggressive moves in pushing American military, economic, technological, and cultural powers won the Cold War. While half the world hated the USA in the 1980s, half of the other half loved it for its jet fighters, personal computers, pop music, and sitcoms.
In any case, Schlafly’s final public appearance was her endorsement of Donald Trump, and that appearance intrigued Cate Blanchett when she accepted her role. Metafictionally, every liberal underestimated this Midwest conspiracy theorist/political activist who again got her wish, from the failure of ERA in 1980, to the victory of Trump in 2016, and after her death, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and now Trump’s brand of America First.
Trump has been compared with William McKinley, who formed the 1890 Tariff Act, had the sight of using it to force Canada to yield to the United States, and dreamed of connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic with an American-owned canal, which was realized by his successors Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Historian Niall Ferguson, meanwhile, compared Trump’s American vision to Richard Nixon’s, while ironically attempted to unravel the world that Henry Kissinger built.
A very unscientific, very not recommended book that forms my worldview is George Friedman’s The Storm Before the Calm. The book sees American history as cycles of fifty years punctuated by a decaying technology (bank credit from 1932 to 1980, personal computer from 1980 to 2030) and eighty years punctuated by major institutional changes, which unfortunately also meant wars. The American Revolution, when self-rule beatthe British colonial system. The Civil War, when the federal authority beat the state authority. The Second World War, when American internationalism beat nationalism. Nobody wants any major war this year or the next, but the world from 1945 to this day has been the world of technocracy, and technocracy has been failing over this century.
One can see this period differently. The American era. The neoliberal era. Even the Jewish American era. It’s been objectively the peak of human achievement, capped by the globalization of the 1990s. Even today, amid our grumbling, people and goods could circle the globe in days, and ideas like this could reach anyone on Earth in a flash.
So why is it ending? The passage of time. Because it can no longer satisfy the world, including millions of Americans. Because other countries are catching up to America’s superiority in economy, technology, and military, and naturally they want a different path from the 1990s, when they only had to watch CNN on the way to apply for a place at Harvard and returning home to work for Microsoft or Citibank.
Fairly or not, millions of people who voted for Trump, and not just working-class white Americans, believed this neoliberal arrangement didn’t work for them. Worse, over the past generation they saw the woke rules applied everywhere. On their TVs, their newspapers, their workplaces, and their social media.
The woke people said they never liked neoliberalism either. Too capitalist, too white, too heteronormative. They wanted a different world, a diverse, equitable (instead of equal), and inclusive one. And they meant it.
And that’s where the parallel lines between the woke and America First are formed. They are serious. They are serious about hating the centrists. They are serious about renaming places, whether it’s Naarm instead of Melbourne or Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico. They are serious about abolishing the State of Israel and NATO. They are serious that American international institutions are harming the world and don’t do anything for Americans. They are serious in thinking that Zionists, whatever that means, are the deep state.
My point isn’t that America First is caused by the woke 2010s. The left continues with their worldviews and ideas, split between those who believe Kamala should have won the election had not for X and the centrists, and those who believe Kamala stood for the genocidal Zionists, so her loss was deserved (too bad these two sides never fought in public).
My point is America First is the other side of the coin of wokeness, the right-wing version of the radical politics that seek to upend the status quo. To make it cruel to the left, the reality is a far-right government could win elections easier than any far-left government. Of course, for America First voters, the far left got there first since Obama, hiding their radical politics behind their professional credibility and black-tie dinners and celebrity peddlers.
That is all for now, and certainly I don’t want to be right about Trump. Certainly, nobody wants him to invade Canada or Gaza or let Kyiv fall to Russia. But for now, this is the picture that I could present on the worldview of America First.