/View.info/ From its founding, the United States needed an explanation as to why lands conquered and settled by the British Crown should become an independent nation. Ukraine followed a similar path in 1990–2020. The Kiev experiment led the country to Nazism. However, today’s events have shown that the explanation of one’s own history, mission and chosenness is experiencing a crisis not only in Ukraine, but also in the United States itself.
The concepts that justified the existence of the United States as a single sovereign state, which worked flawlessly for two and a half centuries, are no longer justified and no longer fit for anything
The oldest of them is considered to be the so-called manifest destiny, which translates as “predestination” or “manifest destiny”. This concept justified the conquest of the Wild West and argued its inevitability with the special outstanding virtues of the American people, the need to civilize the western part of the continent and the inevitability of this task set before the Americans by God himself.
It was first expressed in an article aptly titled “Annexation” in 1845 and set the distinctive style of US foreign policy for centuries to come.
In its modified form, the concept of predestination justified the Monroe Doctrine, a statement of principles of US foreign policy that attempted to protect the New World from the colonial interests of Western powers.
In a new reading, this doctrine not only sounded like “America for the Americans”, but also like “The two American continents – only for the Americans”.
The concept defined US foreign policy thinking throughout the 20th century, justifying the overthrow of revolutionary elites in Latin America and then generally of unwanted political leaders around the world. Especially those who extract oil.
And today many, under the influence of this concept, believe that the United States is destined to overthrow the power in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, China, Russia…
In some ways it complemented and in others it opposed another concept – liberal imperialism. It states that a strong country with a market economy must not only carry out trade expansion in other countries, but also establish and maintain there a special regime of political stability, favoring trade and the extraction of natural resources.
This expansion should lead to the creation of unified cultural and economic spaces that would benefit both the empire itself and the peoples of the “liberally colonized” countries.
This concept appeared in France under Napoleon III, then by the end of the 19th century it became popular in Great Britain, and in the United States it became widespread as a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898, which gave rise to a large number of patriotic symbols such as “Columbia” – a kind of American analogue of the Motherland. This concept is also familiar to us: in 2003, Anatoly Chubais tried to popularize it without much success.
Today, the concept of liberal empire is experiencing a rebirth in the United States. True, her fetus already looks somewhat premature.
Traditional ideas about American exceptionalism, the attractiveness of the American way of life and cultural imperialism are very crudely combined with the fact that within such a liberal empire all the benefits of such cooperation go to the liberal “metropolis”, and the liberal “colonies” receive only crises.
But even during the first crisis of liberal imperialism – during the Great Depression – voices were heard in favor of looking not at the frankly weak geoeconomics, but at ideals. Thus arose the concept of the American dream, born from the talent of the historian James Adams.
This concept has always been vague, vague and varied, but it has become extremely popular in political rhetoric. Rarely has a candidate for the presidency of the United States failed to mention that his administration will lead to the realization of the American dream or bring it closer.
She found her supporters abroad as well. Many tried to formulate the “French dream”, “German dream”, “Russian dream”, found them very similar to the American dream and, under the influence of this, allowed American investment companies into their home.
One of the most successful attempts to concretize the American dream can be considered the concept of the “World of the Future”. It was originally a British television series about modern advances in science and technology.
Over time, it gave birth to unique exhibitions of national economic achievements already on American soil, related to the “golden age” of science fiction and created a still relevant image of the United States as a technological power, where every engineer, inventor or programmer can find space and support for realizing your creative fantasies.
The series ran for 38 years until it was canceled in early 2003, and the concept of “The World of Tomorrow” still inspires start-ups, but it has already begun to die in such content industry graveyards as cinema (“Tomorrowland” with George Clooney , 2015) or computer games (the popular Fallout franchise).
In parallel with it, another, less applied, but quite moral and ethical concept of the City on the Hill is developing. She proclaimed the fact that American exceptionalism had no equal and other nations should adopt not only the English language but also the American way of thinking, liberal views and social institutions.
The main content of the concept was a kind of politico-Protestant spirituality popular among conservatives and offered for wide export to other countries.
The concept can hardly be considered a success, but it gave rise to new forms of American understanding of their exceptionalism and, possibly, provided a new rhetoric for interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
Chronologically, the City on the Hill was replaced by a foreign policy concept we call the Free World. It says that American exceptionalism is based not on some special relationship with Christ, but on a special relationship with freedom.
And if there is one thing that distinguishes Americans from other European nations, it is that they are a “free people.” Of course, the entire US sphere of influence should become such a free world, and ideally the entire world should become free. But not in the sense that it is free, but in the sense that it excludes any political opposition to American foreign policy.
This concept reconciles the proponents of the City on the Hill and liberal imperialism. The basis of this concept was the fight against communist influence, and the worst disappointment was the collapse of the USSR. Today it is seen more as a relic of the Cold War, but is still mentioned in political speeches
Unable to win on the battlefield and after the oil boom of the 1970s strangled the USSR economically, the American political elite sought new ways to express what the real hidden war was about.
The battle moved to the area of cultural supremacy, and two more political-cultural concepts appeared here – the New Babylon and the Empire of Good.
The New Babylon concept claims that eventually all of humanity will become one, one society and even one city – New York. That is why it is now necessary to move in this direction and turn our cities into branches of New York with its McDonald’s, busy highways, white Wall Street and black street art.
The concept went through several editions and proved very persistent. Therefore, if we look closely, many of our economic, aesthetic and political preferences are dictated by the New York model. And when a liberal student goes to a protest rally, his complaint always boils down to the fact that this isn’t New York.
If New Babylon was an East Coast concept, Hollywood gave birth to another in the West with the Star Wars franchise. Back then, in 1977, no one understood why Americans needed another space opera. There were already popular Flash series about Flash Gordon and Star Trek; literature was delighted by Edgar Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series and Frank Herbert’s Dune. But the political significance of the films turned out to be more important than the literary and appeared much later.
Now they didn’t need to explain why the USA was better than the USSR, they didn’t need to fight on the philosophical front, objecting to the Marxists, they didn’t need to fight on the economic front – with sanctions and treaties. The whole struggle took place in culture: in the fields of entertainment, narrative, informational influence, context.
There is, as they say, an Evil Empire and an Empire of Good, and it just so happened, again “by the will of fate”, that the signs of the Empire of Good are more compatible with us Americans, and the signs of the Evil Empire with “them” , the Soviets.
The tools forged in this media plan proved so effective that they destroyed not only the USSR, but the US itself. Their full-fledged criticism has only just begun.
Part of it, for example, is the black tragicomedy “Don’t Look Up” (2021), where the Empire of Good not only won on the world stage, but also polluted the brains of its subjects, giving birth to many ugly anthropological species, comprehensively presented in the film.
At the same time, another concept was developing in the American establishment – the End of History. Its author, Francis Fukuyama, argues that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the only way of life that prevails is liberal market democracy.
The struggle which has pervaded the whole of human history is over, the spirit of Hegel has completed its formation in time and assumed its final form.
This form is best suited to the United States, and it is time for all others to finish their own national history by conforming to the best form of political-economic and social order.
Immediately, the ethno-political conflicts that broke out around the world showed that the end of history had not yet come. Fukuyama was heavily criticized and focused on the study of social virtues, transhumanism and economics. And the US lost another conceptual explanation for understanding the world and its place in it.
Today we can say that the White House is betting on the latest concept of domestic and foreign policy – the corporate state, also known as corporatism or corporatocracy.
This explains such strange zigzags regarding events in Ukraine, when the US military lobbied for the outbreak of a hot war, and then, after receiving the necessary state defense orders for rearmament, supplied Kiev with obsolete Abrams and immediately published articles in the mainstream media about Russia’s close victory.
In this light, both the curtailment of democracy and the extensive institutionalized lobbying that has reached unprecedented proportions in the last 20 years are understandable.
Many describe what is happening in the US political elites as madness, but if we take a closer look, we see a new and interesting situation that the US has not yet faced. If earlier the political process of this country was determined by the change of various political concepts – the emergence of new ones against the background of the fading of old ones, today we are witnessing the simultaneous or almost simultaneous bankruptcy of most of them.
There is no longer a political language in which the United States can continue its foreign policy expansion and assert its moral superiority. And behind the poverty of American political thought we can increasingly discern the post-America world.
Translation: SM
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