Trump and "Western civilization"

"America First" is way too simplistic a way to understand him

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A while ago I wrote an academic paper called ‘Civilizational Wilsonianism from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump’. A lot of it is kind of in the weeds of academic debates about U.S. foreign policy history, but at the core of it is a simple claim. And that claim is that for as much as Donald Trump likes to talk about “America First”, a lot of his agenda might be better understood as “Western Civilization First”. (I went on to argue that this makes him very similar to Woodrow Wilson, a president who he is often said to be the opposite of).

What I meant by this is that Trump and MAGA have a very specific idea of what “Western civilization” is, and their agenda is defined by trying to defend it. According to them, “Western civilization” is a particular set of values which is primarily the property of the descendants of white Europeans. Those values encompass Christianity, conservative cultural and social values, and liberty understood as letting white Christians pretty much do what they want.

But they further argue that other people are not necessarily capable of living by them. And another part of their worldview is that it is legitimate to subject other people of other races and religions to subordination and coercive control because they represent a threat to white Europeans and their descendants.

The reason I think that this is a better frame than “America First” for understanding MAGA is that MAGA does not actually want to put “America” first. Instead, it wants to put a minority part of the American population - conservative white Christians - first, and to force everyone else to live by their values. Trump and his followers frequently throw vile invective at other parts of the country precisely because they view them as a sort of “threat from within” to the true values of Western civilization.

Another consequence of this worldview is that Trump and MAGA also take an interest in what happens to “Western civilization” elsewhere in the world. They try to boost right-wing populists who share their values, criticize liberal governments for their migration policies, and generally stick their nose into other countries’ domestic affairs.

A great recent example of this has come from a cable leaked to The New York Times in which Secretary of State Marco Rubio apparently told U.S. embassies to press Europe and other Western nations to change their immigration policies. According to the report, American diplomats have to tell their host governments that migrants cause crime and are a threat to “social cohesion and public safety”. The goal is to build “host government and stakeholder support to address and reform policies related to migrant crime, defending national sovereignty, and ensuring the safety of local communities”.

Again, this is contrary to the idea that MAGA represents a pure form of “America First”. Telling France to let in fewer brown-skinned Muslim migrants (and let’s be clear, they’re not talking about Spanish or Belgian immigrants here) shows not just a concern for the United States, but also for “Western civilization” on a global scale.

Lest we miss the point, other members of the Trump regime have been even more explicit:

In a speech at the United Nations in September, Mr. Trump denounced the “globalist migration agenda.” Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, and Vice President JD Vance have been equally vocal. “We cannot rebuild Western civilization, we cannot rebuild the United States of America or Europe, by letting millions and millions of unvetted illegal migrants come into our country,” Mr. Vance said in February.

So what’s at stake here beyond academic quibbling about the usefulness of the term “America First”?

I think actually quite a lot, because the consequences of this worldview are not just State Department diplomatic cables that get mostly ignored. Civilizational thinking also plays a large role in the friendliness that Trump and other MAGA figures show towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which they see as a bulwark of cultural and social conservatism against “woke-ism”, atheism, and gender equality.

It also helps to explain why their main concern about China is not the aggressive actions it might take against its liberal democratic neighbors, but the way its manufactured exports undermined the stability of conservative, rural, Midwestern life.

Finally, it also helps to explain why they feel so willing to put aside Europe’s concerns about the ultimate fate of Ukraine, threaten to annex parts of European countries, and to treat the continent essentially as an enemy in U.S. trade policy. They see Europe as a place fallen from grace, one that has largely turned its back on Western civilization by adopting atheism, open migration policies, and liberal cultural politics.

They don’t feel the old attachment to their old civilizational birthplace because they believe it’s no longer the same as it once was. And unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about that - at least, nothing I would have us do.