One of the ways in which the current President of the United States differs from all his predecessors, from George Washington to Barack Obama, is that unlike them he does not speak of his country's special mission. When Donald Trump talks about making America ‘great' again, he means only aggrandisement and enrichment, of being the biggest bully on the block in an endless, purposeless jostling and scrapping of nations. What he does not mean is progress toward a providentially ordained goal, a ceaseless quest to live up to the meaning of the American creed. In a most un-American way, he does not think history has a direction.
There have been other deniers of the American project in the past, though none of them became president. There were, for example, the ‘America First' campaigners who were willing to accommodate the US to a Nazi-dominated world, the Indiana senator who sneered that Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence contained not ‘self-evident truths' but ‘self-evident lies' and the pro-slavery Southerner, quoted by Jill Lepore, who thought the ‘world had not improved in the last two thousand, probably four thousand years'. It is enough, perhaps, simply to quote these words to remind ourselves that such expressions have been the outliers in the American political tradition. And Lepore's magnificent book explains why that is so.
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