Originally Posted by
TheDarman
Right, the other policy positions are as window dressing--pulled, seemingly, from the wide popularity of these ideas among the wider electorate to make it more palatable to even less radicalized folks. That means that they don't come out of political philosophies of leftism or rightism. They are only there to make the movement more appealing and seemingly populist.
This is a really good breakdown of the primary tenets of Trumpism that the rest of the policies are basically window dressing for. This is a good analysis.
On a related note, what I found most fascinating about Captain America: Civil War was this very real discussion of unilateralism and multilateralism. This doesn't really relate to Trump, but it seems to be a discussion about foreign policy in the age of Obama vs. Cheney (the main man behind Bush's foreign policy decisions). Iron Man, in that film, is clearly understanding the need for others to "check" the Avengers and prevent them from acting unilaterally in places that they lack understanding of the consequences. In this way, Stark is reacting to Ultron, which would be similar to the invasion of Iraq (albeit with perhaps better intentions)--an action undertaken by an arrogant and overconfident party believing that they had all the answers about how to "fix" the world. Meanwhile, Captain America is trying to enable the Avengers to continue to act in this role. He claims that the Avengers are far more benevolent than others (a kind of analogous argument for "American exceptionalism") and shouldn't be relegated to cow-towing to others with "agendas" (as if the Avengers don't have agendas of their own--see his behavior with Bucky).
Obama's ideas were about international liberalism--working with other countries to better secure our freedoms both here and abroad. It was about working with one another and trading with one another and creating a system of coordinated interdependence with one another to work towards cooperation instead of unilateral action by the most powerful military force on the planet. In a way, it was easing off of our responsibility, under a realist understanding of international relations, to police the world ourselves and making everyone police their own behavior. But, I think rightly, Obama understood that we had to ease off of that responsibility rather than immediately moving to a new international order. (Obviously, the analogy breaks down here with the Avengers case--it was all or nothing right away and I think that led to easily foreseeable issues in the film where Stark completely abandons his own views.) I think Obama's foreign policy legacy will look better and better in the rear view mirror with Libya being a shining example of one disastrous policy decision. The decision to have humility and understand that the United States can't unilaterally solve all the world's problems (see Syria and the diverse interests forming the rebels making it difficult to pick favorites therein) was wise and appropriate and a break from Cheney's decisions under the Bush Administration. Additionally, the understanding that things should first be worked out with diplomatic solutions being exhausted first (the Iran Nuclear Deal) was a fantastic way of re-visualizing the way we could use American influence. We could still the lead the world by more directly engaging with it rather than rebuffing it. At the root of Obama's foreign policy is a single phrase: benevolent pragmatism.
Trump, however, is neither Cheney nor Obama. It is not about maintaining "American exceptionalism" on the world stage. It is not about thinking that we are heroes in the story and can save everyone else. His policy is, thusly (ironically like Obama's), not rooted in the fundamental understanding of us as a benevolent actor who can single-handedly solve everyone else's problems as well as our own. At the root of Trumpism, however, isn't benevolent pragmatism. Much like the rest of Trump's leadership on issues, his policy positions are rooted in a deep selfishness. Every international crisis is framed with, "What do we get out of this?" and "Do we get enough from this arrangement?" It is a deeply cynical worldview that has a lot of credibility among both of the more entrenched wings of the left and the right. The fundamental question becomes how to make sure that we are better off, either at the expense of everyone else or ensuring that we avoid any kind of moralistic stance if it means we engage in statecraft when the outcome isn't truly perceived as worthwhile. It is a retreat from the world stage and a complete forsake of our prior role as "leader of the free world" and an attempt to make us just the largest player in a reorganized international scene where everyone is merely out for themselves. At the root of Trumpism is cynicism and I think we ignore a good portion of that.
It is a reasonable response that people don't really understand in America because we have been so disconnected from our foreign policy.
Since Truman, America's role has been to be the benevolent imperialist. Unfortunately, after Truman, we stopped being that and were overtaken by a ton of paranoia and concern about our adversaries all being out to get us. Johnson being led into Vietnam, in spite of the fact that it was a war that was only made that much messier by our involvement and would only prolong a war that the South Vietnamese were ultimately destined to lose, was a byproduct of that and really hurt what was a really positive domestic agenda. Nixon and Ford carried that forward by, instead of focusing on the world's security, we turned instead back to "realism"--the very doctrine whose natural consequence is getting people like Trump on the extremes of that understanding. By the time Carter was in office, it was so engrained in our foreign policy is virtually impossible to reverse and it led to foreseeable consequences with the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Reagan promised to return us to Ford and Nixon's understanding of foreign policy rather than Carter's, a man who was crippled by seeming paralysis because he couldn't reasonably be expected to act within a framework of policy that he didn't agree with.
By the time Clinton was president, it simply wasn't worthwhile to fight that fight. Domestic politics made it difficult to retreat after we viewed the world as simply more "secure" with our presence in it. There were virtually no more wars left to fight and we could just stagnate, with our troops simply "there". Of course, this ended up being a huge mistake. There was no purpose to keep American troops in the Middle East after the Soviet Union had collapsed and was no longer threatening our former allies. Our constant oversight ended up leading to radicalization of the same people we had depended on to fight back against the Soviets--and their reasons for fighting the Soviets were the same as the reasons for fighting us.
That led to a more virulent version of American exceptionalism under Bush and Cheney--a natural consequence of Reagan and Bush Sr. after the 9/11 attacks. The simple conclusion being that we could crush terrorist insurrections easily because we had decimated countries. Ironically, the most successful operation was against the country of Iraq (at least militaristically, the enemy had been eliminated, but the foreseeable consequence of creating a power vacuum with no one there remotely ready to confront which direction the country should go in). The truth is that intelligence organizations and special forces are far better equipped to combat terrorism than the United States military. But there was this false and derivative idea that somehow our exceptional military could do anything and was as versatile as it needed to be.
Obviously, I already covered Obama and Trump above, but, in many ways, the continued problems with terrorism come from the history that we had here.
And the domestic ideology is, frankly, far more alarming. The kind of foreign policy Trump has is an understandable reaction to a realist framework. Sanders isn't even that dissimilar from Trump in his view of our role in the world and that we should be retreating from it unless we get some kind of clear benefit from being there.
But the white nationalism that Trump inspired is what is truly problematic. That ideology is what is truly demonstratively dangerous, but it is, also, a natural consequence of the overall world view: selfishness.