CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Donald Trump: End of the “American Century”?

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

What will be Donald Trump’s legacy?  Obviously, there’s two-plus years left in his second – and, hopefully – last term in office.  But who knows, he might declare a “national emergency” and attempt an “FDR” and go for a third term. Nevertheless, even without a crystal ball, his legacy looks pretty bleak.

Never-ending revelations about Trump’s use of his position — and the federal government — for self-aggrandizement is offending many of his staunchest supporters; his interventional into the World Cup decisions makes his power evermore petty.  Add to these Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu suckering him into a doomed war with Iran; his failed tariff policies; his over-zealous targeting of immigrants; and rising inflation that is hurting working Americans while his super-rich backers get richer.

However, Trump’s long-term legacy may be the president who ended the “American Century.”

Henry Luce, founder of Time (1923) and Fortune (1929), opened his legendary 1941 article, “The American Century,” with these words: “We Americans are unhappy.  We are not happy about America.  We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. …”

Going further, Luce offered a grand concept of a new America:

… our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals … a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of cooperation … we are the inheritors of great traditions of Western civilization – above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of charity. …  It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist call a little lower than the angels.  

… our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals … a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of cooperation … we are the inheritors of great traditions of Western civilization – above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of charity. … 

It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist call a little lower than the angels.  

This vision linked the rise of America’s international hegemony to the engine of domestic economic prosperity that would both fuel the nation’s global military reach and assure popular allegiance.

Reading Luce today, one is struck by how he anchored the “American Century” in the........

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