The New Americanism

THIS COULD BE ANOTHER Alexis de Tocqueville moment for America. A pilgrim in search of democracy’s impulses and ingenuities, the French aristocrat was the first outsider to go eloquent on American exceptionalism. He was impressed and intrigued in equal measure by the attitudes of freedom. He was in awe, also a bit sceptical of how it would be made use of for the greater good; and with a Gallic sense of cultural superiority, he doubted whether Americans would ever vote for “superior men” and whether such men would even dare to contest. Two centuries after the publication of Democracy in America, freedom’s most storied nation, and the most powerful still, seems to be waiting for a traveller as observant as the French nobleman. It is a story to be told: the possibilities of a brand that evokes extreme emotions across the world. Has the brand been damaged after President Trump—who may not live up to Tocqueville’s superior men—dropped the tariff bomb, though defused for a specific period, but with no respite for China? Or is it that the man has added to the American brand a darker shade of power, a bargaining strategy by the ultimate dealmaker?

The lamentations are coming from all quarters. Even those hesitant conservatives who wanted Trump 2.0 to succeed, just to quash liberal alarmism, are crying over an unhinged narcissist’s attack on the American Dream. The tariff threat, by undoing the spirit of globalisation—and America was its spiritual core—took the country back to nationalist paranoia: make America great as a protectionist, me-alone power. The trade war comes after the mass deportation of the “deplorables”. (The word has outlived the class-based contempt of Hillary Clinton to become a MAGA synonym for the parasitical lives feeding on the American cream.) Uncontrolled and illegal immigration may have played a big role in turning Candidate Trump into an American who cared for the Americans. The open borders certainly made popular access to the heart of Trumpism easier. He brought an issue that liberals were evasive about—and an issue that on both sides of the Atlantic mobilised resentment against the ruling class—to the national conversation. The deportation drama is not an extension of the rage against the unchecked borders. The chaotic process with flimsy legal grounds strikes at the fundamentals of the American ideal.

The American Dream, as dreamt by the founding fathers and pursued by the largest number of people from the farthest corners of dispossession and dictatorships, has already shrunk. It’s not as if only liberals are worried about the metaphorical fall of America. Conservatives, not the MAGA isolationists fed on the gospels of JD Vance and Tucker Carlson, too are frustrated by Trump’s failure to make Trumpism the next American awakening on the Right after Reaganism. What is missing in Trump’s America, in the words of the conservative columnist Bret Stephens, is “a type of democratic nobility”. The quality that made America the most inspired stage for overcoming the worst and realising the best in the history of free societies.

Trump, the instinctive president, sees virtue in the prosaicness of power, not in the poetry of the American Dream. What America needs, tells his instinct (which is always audible to the entire world), is the toughest guy in the job, for the balance of power needs to be tilted by national strength. By defying rulebooks, ignoring conventions and trusting his inner Machiavelli, Trump may seem to be nationalising the American Dream. Or de-Americanising the world. It’s the Trumpian way of building a unipolar world on the ruins of an international order in which America was an apologetic power rather than the primary power for so long. In the Trumpian universe, the American brand is not dead. It is being re-fantasised as a national emblem worthy of being captured on a MAGA cap.

In another time, the brand of freedom shone brighter when the enemy from the other side of the Iron Curtain had its own brand to sell. For the American brand marketed by Trump, what is on the other side may not be a Soviet Republic of China. Beijing still doesn’t have the Soviet-style sphere of influence, even though the American superman loves the idea of a Cold War redux, him looming over the enemy with retributive powers. Presidents seeking a historic setting to prove their mettle are not new. When you are denied one, bluster becomes the doctrine. The diminished brand of America has given way to another: the kind of personalisation of power democracy has never seen before.

American politicsdemocracyDonald Trumpeconomic ideologyfreedomgeopoliticsMAGAtrade tariff