Not Believing in Ourselves: Part 2
Postwar Conservatism vs. America First
A variety of explanations account for the Trump administration's opposition to U.S. information programs. These explanations range from familiar Republican hostility and suspicions of U.S. government-funded media content to a backlash against the Bush administration's disastrous nation-building efforts. Another explanation this post will explore is the impact of the Biden’s administration decision to merge its domestic aim of renewing democracy at home, which in practical terms meant marginalizing and discrediting Trump and the political movement that supports him, with the ideological portion of great power competition with the authoritarian powers.
None of these explanations, however, go deep enough, as at its core the Trump administration’s hostility to U.S. information programs reflects a profound shift in conservative thinking. This shift is philosophical. It is a movement away from a conservative philosophy that emerged in the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust, and the demonstration of the extraordinary destructive power of atomic weapons. This philosophy was formulated amid the twilight struggle with the Soviet Union, and it dominated conservative thinking until 2015.
Today, a new ideology is challenging and, mostly, displacing postwar conservatism. America first and right-wing populist movements in Europe have very different attitudes toward world affairs. These international movements views have evolved out of a domestic and geostrategic environment which differs from the historic struggles against totalitarian Germany and the Soviet Union. Today’s right-wing movements are rooted more in 19th than 20th century conservative thought.
Shaping Events for the Worldview of Right-wing Populism
Domestic issues have mostly fueled the rise of right-wing populism. Underlying factors include economic dislocation caused by technology and trade, vast cultural differences between traditional religious communities and secular urban professionals, and differing views on citizenship and diversity that feed into debates about the value or danger of immigration. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to ignore the connection between the geopolitical environment of the 2000s and 2010s and the increasing support for right-wing populist movements. Several major events helped propel the America First movement and shape its thinking.
The attacks of September 11th and what became known as the War on Terrorism thrust the world into a new era. The perception that terrorism and violence could strike anywhere fueled a sense of paranoia and fear. Doubly disturbing was that this violence could spring at any time from citizens of Western countries who had secretly pledged loyalty to a foreign terrorist group. This fed into a sense that the values and traditions Western states are based upon were a contested space and many immigrates from other parts of the world were enemies and not allies in this fight.
The Great Recession, which spiraled out of the financial crisis, created a sense of pessimism among many on the left and right about the West’s economic system. The crisis triggered a profound mistrust of the elite, as it was the supposedly best and the brightest who underwrote the financial mismanagement that caused the meltdown. Then, those same elites turned to taxpayers, saying, the world is going to end if you fail to bail us out of the situation we created. The slow economic recovery, which many nations in Europe never fully emerged from, also created questions about the long-term trajectory of the Western world. Instead of being ascendant, perhaps the West was in decline and its role in the world should be to protect itself from outside influences rather than to push others into adopting its economic and political model.
One of the more notable things about the second Trump administration is that it is filled with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. This includes Vice President Vance, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Gabbard, among others. All three of them have written and spoken about how their military experiences shaped their views of world affairs. JD Vance wrote in 2020, “I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world. I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.”
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which morphed into exercises of what the Bush administration called nation-building, are a touchstone for right-wing populism. As with the Great Recession, the Iraq War fueled mistrust of institutions and the elites. The casus belli for the invasion, Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, were never found, and instead of being greeted as liberators, the United States found itself bogged down in a deadly and brutal counter-insurgency fight.
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, exemplified by members of Trump’s team, implemented or witnessed in person the Bush administration’s democracy promotion efforts. In both countries, the DOD, USAID and the State Department spent hundreds of billions of dollars on Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT). These organizations provided aid to outlying communities with the goal of building up the rule of law, assisting with reconstruction and development, and improving governance. The military side of this equation was providing aid, would motivate local assistance for U.S. counterinsurgency efforts. The dismal failure of PRTs fueled skepticism about U.S. efforts to spread freedom and democracy around the world, about whether democracy was possible or appropriate for regions with vastly different cultures and histories, and a profoundly negative view of U.S. direct intervention in conflicts overseas.
Postwar conservatism vs. America First
Three major differences between postwar conservatism and right-wing populism explain the increasing hostility to information programs and the ideological component of great power competition.
The first major difference centers on whether the values of liberal democracy are universal or are culturally specific. Postwar conservatives argued all states could successfully move toward a political order based upon individual rights and electoral democracy. How far, how fast, and how deep this process of westernization, modernization, and progress could occur was a point of contention between conservatives and liberals, but the universality of this vision was not contested.
Populist on the other hand, see Western culture as a unique product of a Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Other cultures have very different traditions, and we should not expect them to converge with the type of societies we enjoy in the West. In fact, Judeo-Christian civilization must be vigorously defended against its civilizational rivals. Another danger is the dilution of Western society, which is occurring as vast numbers of migrates from civilizations who do not share Judeo-Christian values are allowed into European and North American states.
A second area where post-conservatives and populists differ is in whether human rights and individual autonomy support traditional values and institutions or threaten them. This is particularly true as the discussion of human rights has shifted from universal values such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, to identity politics.
Postwar conservatives believed religion and traditional values were threatened by totalitarian forces of the right and left. Communists banned religion and sought to replace it with a revolutionary transformation into a classless society. Right-wing dictatorships also sought to coerce individuals and institutions into their state-fueled ideology, for example, Nazism. Western governments in postwar conservatives’ eyes, had a duty to secure and protect individuals from coercive efforts to impose values and eliminate personal autonomy. For conservatives, this protection extended into areas important to them, such as family life, cultural traditions, and religion.
Today’s right-wing populists come to the opposite conclusion about the current formulations of human rights. They see national governments and international institutions' efforts to protect human rights as an attempt to impose progressive values on them. Human rights in this formulation are not universal rights such as freedom of religion or protecting individuals' autonomy to decide for themselves but woke values on race, gender, and sexuality, which powerful institutions controlled by liberals used to undermine the traditional values conservatives uphold. Populist also fear that that an excessive focus on personal autonomy has become an exercise in selfishness and hedonism, which undermines rather than re-enforces societal stability.
A third area of difference is the relationship between international institutions and national sovereignty. Postwar conservatives, after a period of suspicion, came around to the idea that Western states needed to be protected from mass politics and revolutionary forces. For American conservative this flowed naturally from the history of the United States, where the country has always sought a balance between popular input (elections) and institutions controlled the elite to prevent instability. These elite institutions were designed to mitigate the democratic forces of the day, for example, the slow-moving Senate with its six-year terms and the judicial branch with its lifetime tenures. In the international area, this logic extended to institutions such as NATO, the UN, the European Union, and the IMF, which were founded upon liberal democratic principles. These institutions were designed to constrain national economic and political policies that might stray under popular pressure from democratic liberal values.
As the name indicates, populists value the people over the elite and the powerful. They see institutions that claim to promote stability as undemocratic forces that seek to thwart the national popular will. In a sense, they are not wrong, as their views are seen by the people employed in these international institutions are a threat to the values those institutions seek to promulgate. Populists argue many policies imposed at an international level should be solely subject to national decision makings hence, the referendum on whether Britain should withdraw from the European Union. There is also an element of fear you can hear from populists associated with the power wielded by non-Western states within these organizations. Instead of the West dictating through international organizations its views and values, it is now on the receiving end from non-Western and non-democratic states.
Conclusion
Given the Trump administration's vast funding cuts and staff layoffs at the State Department, USAID, and other development agencies, there is no reason to be surprised U.S. information programs, cultural exchange, and democracy promotion are on the chopping block. However, as explored in the previous post and this one, there is a lot more going on than an exercise in cutting government spending.
In one respect, these cuts can be viewed as part of Trump’s revenge tour. Democracy promotion under President Biden went well beyond ideological competition with China and Russia. It included direct criticism of right-wing allies of Trump in Poland, Brazil, Hungary, and populist parties in Western European countries. Organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, which are supposed to be promoting democracy abroad, began including in their analysis the state of democracy inside the United States and the need to renew democracy at home after the damage done by Trump. As has been the case in many other government institutions, the Trump team has sought to get rid of anyone in the deep state who investigated him, criticized him, or seemed loyal to Democrats.
In another respect, the Trump administration isn’t interested in ideological competition with China or anyone else because they are not wed to the position that the United States is based upon a set of ideals which all people should aspire to. The Trump team wants to influence world affairs by utilizing the country’s vast economic and military power as leverage to get what it wants. They have expressed no interest in the theory of soft power — that through persuasion and attraction the United States can achieve its objectives. Nor that China can be weakened through the provision of information to its citizens that the Communist Party is censoring or that China’s global position can be curtailed by highlighting its brutal suppression of its own people and its corrupt practices abroad.
All of this speaks to a vast pessimism about the United States. A section of the country has stopped believing in the promise of America. Instead, they are focused on protecting their families and traditions from what they view as an assault from their domestic opponents, who are aligned with international forces. In a similar fashion to left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, they are against U.S. government information programs because they have a negative viewed of the society they live in, a society they do not believe should be defended or promoted abroad.