The Donroe Doctrine

What's in a name...

While, as Greg Grandin argues in “Americam América” US “Manifest Destiny” owes it’s continuance in US policy towards Latin America to the differences between Catholic and Puritan theology (it’s manifest that the “saved” should inerit the earth (or, at least the big chunk this side of the Atlantic). Later embellishments, like “social darwinism” and 19th-century Positivism no doubt contributed, but

I don’t have the tools – intellectualy or academically – for a deep dive into all this, but shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Mr. Trump is a heir to a long historical tradition … a “true believer” in American Exceptionalism.

What is surprising is that, as intellectually incurious as he is, and from the kind of guy whose “historical memory” (like apparently most people in the US) dates back maybe as far a1945, that Donald Trump has any sense at all of 19th century history. Not that Trump bears more than the most superficial sense of that history, but at least enough to convince himself (and signal to visitors to the Oval Office) that the “Donroe Doctrine” has some historical basis in the Presidency of James Knox Polk.

BUT....

Unlikely the flighty TACO Trump... flitting from one obsession to another. I will give Polk credit for one thing. He wasn’t flightly, and he didn’t try to sugar coat what he intended to do... shoot first and ignore questions later... was his modus operandi. Famously, the one term Illinois congressman, Abraham Lincoln, used to stand up every session and demand the President show the spot where “American blood was spilled on American soil” by Mexican “invaders” and would be completely ignored (and primaried out of his opposition party for a second term... the price any legislator in the US still faces today for challenging “conventional wisdom”, or trying too hard in his or her first term to push an agenda, even one with party support).

Polk stayed focused on his one and only issue... expanding US territory “from sea to shining sea”...and almost single-handedly carving out that massive near-rectangle in the center of North America under a single state. And, having accomplished what he set out to do, Polk denied any intention of returning to politics when his term ended (and, as luck would have it, he died about a month after the end of his term, precluding any second thoughts he might have had).

It’s not that Trump is more subtle than Polk.... rather that his frame of references tends towards the people he knows... gangsters from his background in the always dirty “real estate cartels” of New York to his policy makers (Marco Rubio). Trump is more likely following the script of gangster movies more thanhe is turning to inspiration from US history.

Polk never really sought any personal credit, nor put his personal stamp on any of his actions... we never hear of a Polk corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Trump, of course, seeks to put his name on... well... anything and everything. I tend to believe that “Don” refers less to Donald than to “Don” Corleone.