Trump and the MAGA movement embody the failure of the American model at the end of the millennium-the belief that the United States, after its victory in the Cold War, would remain the sole power to express a unified, and ultimately successful, thought on the international stage, following the implosion of the Soviet bureaucratic state model and the ideology that had embodied it. A few years later, however, the crisis of American hegemony began, triggered by the military collapse in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of China.
The crumbling of the Soviet empire, and with it the "bipolar" geopolitical system, revealed two distinct factors: the difficulty of American global control from a strategic military perspective and the emergence of an increasingly fragmented world, not always easily manageable, often conflictual. At the same time, a significant ideological shift occurred. The collapse of the homeland of state socialism also relegated to the attic of history the anti-communism that had helped unite American society for over fifty years. The new global, "plural" world, besides being more complicated to interpret from a geopolitical and strategic perspective, profoundly shifted the paradigms of thought, bringing to the forefront trends that had seemed to have been set aside. The extraordinary technological and scientific progress of the 20th century seemed to have marked the new era, and the future, as exclusively "materialistic," relegating to the background, especially in the world that "matters," namely the West, historical cultural expressions that seemed to belong to the past, such as religion, or at least its capacity to influence social behavior as a whole. It seemed that in the "developed world," religion was a legacy of the past and could only represent the customs and thinking of societies "still progressing," while the West seemed to have embarked on a journey that had left everything irrational behind. Contrary to logic, however, and precisely in American society, the cradle of technocracy, there has been a radical substitution of values. In the homeland of liberalism, we find one of the most iconic images of American national identity.The Statue of Liberty with her torch, located at the entrance to New York Harbor: symbolically, it welcomed European migrants, promising them full freedom of expression and action. In reality, what represented the "promised land" for millions of desperate people hid a bitter truth: those ships carried the means of production most crucial to the success of American capitalism: the workers' arms. That rhetorical image of "freedom," with that imaginary horizon of emancipation, of unlikely well-being for all, represented the American national identity for many years. The reputation as the "greatest democracy in the world" gave legitimacy, in the eyes of a large portion of American and Western public opinion, to all the international military and political interventions, both overt and covert, that followed one another over the decades in "defense of freedom." The same rhetoric that justified imperialist enterprises in the post-war period, from Korea to Vietnam, to interventions in South America and the Middle East, coups d'état, assassinations Politicians. Time, however, has gradually changed the picture: over the past fifteen years, we have witnessed a radical shift, a replacement of those "national values," a process that has become evident in all its ideological and political aspects with the current administration. America, self-described "homeland of liberty," has always portrayed itself as established in the First Amendment, the cornerstone of the entire US constitutional framework: "It guarantees the fundamental freedoms of worship, speech, the press, peaceful assembly, and petition of the Government. It prohibits Congress from establishing a state religion or abridging free worship, and protects its citizens from government interference."
This criterion has now, in effect, been replaced by a national and religious concept. The authors of this new direction are not to be found in the real estate developer Trump, but in a significant number of MAGA exponents, who also represent Christian churches. It is a mistake to think that the evangelical world is the exclusive monopolizer of radical right-wing positions. Even a significant portion of Catholics are staunch supporters of the MAGA movement, as demonstrated by Trump's substantial Catholic electoral support and the notable phenomenon of conversions to the Catholic Church among evangelical Protestants: Vance is a case in point.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), has well summarized the underlying concept guiding the new course. The minister is a staunch advocate and committed proponent of a line of thought that, at first glance, may paradoxically seem similar to Franco's National Catholic tradition: namely, that "America rightfully deserves world leadership because it is blessed by God and therefore obeys a higher precept."
Among the churches supporting Trump are also the Christian Zionists (present in the magic circle surrounding Trump in the Oval Office of the White House during the prayer/blessing), heirs of the Pilgrim Fathers who landed in North America. They fully express the new national Christian course by affirming that the United States represents the entirety of biblical history.
The language of fundamentalism today has changed profoundly and is distinct from the traditional fundamentalism of the late nineteenth century. At that time, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly in the United States, the language was distinguished by its violent polemics against Darwinism and scientific culture. Now, religion promotes the polarization between faith and nation, and since religion lives and is nourished by the faith of believers, the concept of identity inevitably enters the picture, generating separation and opposition from other believers, conceived as different, antagonistic, and unbelieving, and therefore enemies. This identity is often exacerbated by ethnic differences: Christians versus Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. But in this process, in recent decades, another phenomenon has simultaneously taken shape in the United States, one that seemed to be unique only to some of the more traditionalist areas of the Middle East: the identification of state and religion. This process has also gained momentum in other national cultural areas that in previous decades had experienced separations between state and local churches, and where secularism had at least joined the more conservative and traditional religious expressions. Among the most striking examples are Poland, Russia, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, and India (after independence and the end of the largely failed attempt to create a secular state). If faith coincides with the nation, its "global significance" no longer corresponds solely to economic and strategic achievements, but has a higher value: that of being a witness to the values of a "civilization," understood as the subordination of culture to religion. Here lies the profound difference between the American imperial image of previous decades and the current one. In the postwar years, American political influence also corresponded to a "cultural colonization," the affirmation of the so-called "American way of life." Intellectuals were not needed to explain it; the collective imagination sufficed. The cinematic and television images, the extraordinary economic strength, the invasion of American products, and the economic opportunities the US had always offered and continued to guarantee, spoke for themselves. The supremacy of a political model depended primarily on a proposal for a "lifestyle" that combined well-being, availability of goods, and freedom of expression-elements that clearly outperformed what the competitive model of state capitalism offered. Now the shift is radical: there is no longer any talk of defending well-being or freedom as a "value in itself."
The bombing of Nigerian oil facilities last December was touted by the US administration as a defensive intervention on behalf of Nigerian Christians. Beyond the unstated and real underlying reasons (which correspond to specific geopolitical needs), Trump's media intent is clear, stating that "wherever necessary, there will be interventions to defend Christians."
Sometimes the messages need to be read within a broader communications strategy aimed at the "Christian universe" that supports the Maga electorate. The horizon America proposes is now the same one "Old Europe" had already proposed between the 19th and early 20th centuries, legitimizing and combining, through various nationalist and far-right movements, nation and faith, politics and the sacred, mythologizing and sacralizing the nation and politicizing the sacred. This is yet another demonstration that capitalism has no ideology of its own; everything is possible and permissible, including its opposite, as long as profit and exploitation are safeguarded.
Daniele Ratti
https://umanitanova.org/la-nuova-frontiera-maga-la-religione-dei-valori-nazionali/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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