Miller Continues His White Christmas Twitterings
He's dreaming of a White America, it would seem.
So, this popped up as I was looking for something else:
Honest to God, I am not even sure what it means, save for yet another excuse to use the holiday season to rant about some vague ills that have befallen America and the West as a result of the ominous developing world. In all honesty, a young man in 1903 or one in 1969 would have been amazed at what came next (especially the one in 1903).
MAGA mystifies me in the sense that they seem not to understand that the United States became first a global power, and then a superpower, and remains the most powerful nation on Earth. The US did so, in large measure, because it was a cosmopolitan, globally-oriented state. If America hasn’t been “great” throughout my lifetime (which started not long before the moon landing), I am not sure what a “great” country looks like.*
Setting aside any number of foolish international adventures (Vietnam, the second Gulf War, and Afghanistan come to mind) that cost the US blood and treasure, it is utterly baffling to me to listen to these people rant about how awful the US is, especially as it pertains to empirically knowable power metrics. Who has the US’s military might? Its economic might? Its cultural influence?
Sure, we can argue about any number of aspects of all of this, but the facts are what they are.
The notion that the US has engaged in some debilitating “redistribution of our national resources to the states and peoples of the undeveloped world” makes little sense.
But I think that Miller believes this, and it is frighteningly easy to convince a bunch of our fellow citizens that all their problems are because the US has spent too much money on dirty foreigners. Never mind that the shuttering of life-saving programs at USAID hasn’t led to less government spending.
And allow me to yet again note how much raw (and, indeed, stolen) labor was utilized by the United States from the “underdeveloped” continent of Africa. That history alone undercuts Miller’s bizarre rants that imply racial purity would have led to an even greater America. And allow me to note, yet again, that the Eastern European Jews (i.e., Miller’s ancestors) who migrated to the US in the late 19th/early 20th centuries would have been seen as denizens of the “underdeveloped” “third world,” although that would not have been the language of the day.
Along those lines, I recommend this TNR piece by Greg Sargent: Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State. It is worth a read in full.
*Greatness is a fraught term, to be sure, and I am not trying to downplay any number of shortcomings in American politics and society in my lifetime. Still, by any empirical measure, the US has been a major power since the early 20th Century, was one of two superpowers from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, and the preeminent power in the world since 1989.
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To mangle a saying:
“A little history is a dangerous thing.”
Also, “where is my flying car?”, perhaps?
Nostalgia for an imagined future is perhaps the silliest form of such imaginable.
Why should anything have to make sense, if it serves the cause of irrational grievance politics?
The US largely shaped the world of post-WW2 (and post-Cold War), by conscious and carefully planned effort, to enable both American security and prosperity.
At the same time as avoiding the trap 19th century Europe fell into, of imposing direct imperial rule and exploitation.
But the inevitable price of that was that other countries who worked within the context of that international order would also be able to prosper.
See variously, and in turn, Europe, Japan, China, India, etc
That however has depended primarily on their own efforts, not on “redistribution”.
See the less sucessful in adapting, in eg Africa, or Russia.
Miller’s view of international political economy seem of a piece with a general view of MAGA re domestic political economy: “We wuz robbed! The libruls gave our good life to the undeserving poor!” (Both of darkish skin tone, it would seem.)
It’s a view that echoes a tendency in the European far-right, and indeed the Russian elite.
A sense of grumpy grievance and ressentisment that somehow they have been cheated of their due privileges.
The MAGA electorate are a box of rocks. As is most of the electorate. The MAGA leadership are power seekers with no morals. “Populism” is mostly telling the electorate what they like to hear, while doing nothing for them that might inconvenience the oligarchs. And cooperation is not a concept that Trump grasps
@gVOR10: I was more referring to MAGA elites like Miller and the whole Heritage/Project2025 crew. They are all well-educated enough to know better, even if they don’t draw the exact same conclusions that others with the same education draw.
@JohnSF: I almost mentioned flyin’ cars.
Indeed, I endorse your entire response.
@Steven L. Taylor:
*blushes*
*bows*