Recently a media commentator said Donald Trump was a nationalist. Since Abraham Lincoln declared in his inaugural address of March, 1861 that the government in Washington was a national government, the correct view in written and spoken public discourse has always been that America is a nation. But suddenly It is shocking that Trump plans to take what we have been told for three or four generations seriously. He is going to act as president as though he were the head of a nation.
The root of the shock is that the present state of the worldwide economy now favors America acting as a nation. For a long time America has been shipping its technologies and its capital all over the globe. But It has now no longer any new foreign nations to raise up to modern economic prosperity. Economically and militarily the world can now take care of itself. Before America could not export its goods because the world was too poor to buy them. Not any more. The last reclamation project for America was China.There is now a global market for American products and buyers with deep pockets. History is on Donald Trump’s side. The American economy is booming loaded with all the most advanced technologies and creating new technologies daily while it has at the same time a huge labor force willing to work at low wages. The roaring industrial economy of America in the nineteenth century is all set to roar again in the twenty-first century. Many Americans sense something new is happening and they want a part of it. They want to make America great again. Donald Trump caught their need and is expressing it. He is a nationalist.
Hillary Clinton is an internationalist. She has had too much direct contact with the way the Washington government works to be anything else. She has declared that the decisions she makes as president will affect directly people worldwide. But is it possible for the next president to be an internationalist like President Obama? The world must go on for its own security with Washington acting as a de facto world government but the old diplomatic and military categories that gave rational form to Washington’s worldwide adventures are worn down badly. A nationalist is running for president in America against an internationalist. No one knows who will win.
Daniel McNeill
Interested in the cultural, religious and philosophical meanings symbolized in the ritual drama of a baseball game? Go to Daniel McNeill’s book on the meaning of baseball The Theater Of The Impossible at Amazon.com or click on this link:
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