Since Donald Trump’s election, mass and social media has been buzzing with news and speculation about rapidly developing events in the United States. In his first two weeks, Trump signed a huge number of executive orders; which, if they pass into law, will make an immense difference to the lives of people across the US. His pronouncements on foreign policy will also impact heavily on people in the Middle East, Canada and Mexico, and potentially Greenland, with the European Union firmly in his sights for the immediate future.
Are there any clues lurking in the US’s history that might give some indications as to where his policies may have come from? The answer, set out below, is yes. But the extent of the change with which we are currently being presented is unprecedented, and most definitely places the US onto a perilous, uncharted path. To more fully understand the present, it is useful to consider the past; a summary of which is presented below.
Europeans arrive in America
Traditionally, Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas was proposed to be ‘first contact’, between Europeans and indigenous American people, but recent evidence indicates that small numbers of Scandinavian people were arriving on American shores for at least 1,000 years before that. However, mass migration of Europeans to the Americas only began after the Reformation created a deep division within European Christianity between traditional Roman Catholicism and those who mounted a protest against corruption at the core of its leadership: the Protestants, who were to prove pivotal to the development of the United States.
Immigration occurs due to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. In the case of the initial wave of immigration to America, religious differences leading to persecution of minorities by national governments became a powerful ‘push’ factor. The knowledge that colonies were being established on a newly discovered continent thousands of miles away across the ocean was a significant ‘pull’ factor. Combined with advances in shipping which meant that greater numbers of people could be transported in relative safety, this led to increasing numbers of Europeans seeking to practice their religious faith in peace – by forging a new nation.
The United States begins
The white American population was therefore initially derived from European emigration, with people from Britain forming the largest cohort along the northeastern seaboard. England began establishing colonies in North America in the early 1600s. David Chidester, in his book Christianity, a Global History, proposed that the main reason for British Puritan emigration to America was an ongoing conflict with the Church of England, particularly with regard to the nature of its established authority, which Puritans, a strongly Protestant sect, viewed as “not Protestant enough”.
Puritans were particularly suspicious of archbishops sitting in governance in the English Parliament on the basis that they had been granted some type of special authority from God. They favoured a democratic process, in which religious leaders were elected from the ordinary members of their church.
England expelled
Between 1775 and 1783 the thirteen colonies that had been established on the east coast of North America successfully fought a Revolutionary War to gain full independence from British rule. By that time, according to Jonathan Clark in Britain and America: Studies in Comparative History, the vast majority of the population were enlisted in independent Christian denominations, with only a minority subscribing to the Anglican church. Donald Swift reports, in his book 1998 Religion and the American Experience that British Prime Minister Robert Walpole declared “America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it”.
The American constitution, which expands on the Declaration of Independence, makes it clear that the fledgling country’s culture of religious and personal independence was strongly underpinned by a Puritan-derived Protestant philosophy. This was the source of the ‘all men created equal’ assertion of the Declaration of Independence, which carried forward the democratic ideals of these ‘forefathers’ into 19th-century American politics.
The spirit of capitalism
David Chidester asserts that the United States was forged in the Puritan belief that, in guiding them to land in America, God had provided a bountiful new land in which they were charged with creating a perfect democratic society; a “City on a Hill”, as an example for all other nations on earth to emulate. At the heart of this ideal was what the Declaration of Independence refers to as the God-given right of every independent man (women are notable by their absence) to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, emphasising individual effort and enterprise.
This linked to the strongly held work ethic of the founding fathers; Chidester proposes that the Puritans of New England believed that work and prayer were related activities. In 1835 Alexis De Toqueville wrote of the “wonderful elements of order and morality… the immigrants of New England brought with them”, proposing that “puritanism was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine”. However, early 20th-century sociologist Max Weber took a different view in his thesis, ‘The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism’, proposing that America had created “a philosophy of avarice…the idea of a duty of the individual towards the increase of his capital… it is not mere business astuteness…. it is an ethos”.
And so, from these beginnings, a distinct form of highly individualistic American capitalism was born, which was later to become controversial. The United States began to create a history of its own, one that was no longer directly shared with Britain. In 2019, Matthew Desmond, writing in the New York Times magazine proposed that the American attitude to capitalism grew ‘uniquely severe and unbridled.’ He suggested that this grew out of the use of slavery on the plantations of the south, an issue that will be further explored below.
America: the age of the common man
Between 1820 and the mid-1840s most of the states in the Union gave the vote to almost all white males, ensuring that the Puritan American patriots of the revolution became Christian Democrats, ushering in an ‘age of the common man’.
One facet of this version of Christian democracy was that, whereas the Anglican archbishops who were part of the government within the British parliament were trained and directed by a nationally constituted establishment, the independent American evangelical preachers of the 19th century frequently had little education and no formal theological training at all.
Not all commentators gave positive reports of the resulting situation. Mark Noll comments, in his book A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada that a visitor to the US at that time, author Frances Trollope, depicted evangelical American preachers who formed the main religious establishment in the fledgling United States as rough, wild and all too often given to “vehement expressions of insane or hypocritical zeal”.
Religious schism and manifest destiny
The US was established as, and remains, a federation of states that retain some level of operational independence rooted in specifically local issues, for example business affairs, running elections and public services such as health, education, law enforcement and local road maintenance. State governance must however adhere to the general principles set out in the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
But, during the first half of the 19th century, relentless insistence on independent thought, faith and action meant that ‘adherence’ was viewed from different perspectives by the vast number of Protestant sects that sprang up under such a ‘non-system’. Various schisms began to develop between them, additionally driven by the huge distances between communities across the vast land mass of North America.
This eventually began to create unease within the US federal government, as the drive to ensure that the states remained united was deeply embedded in its ‘City on a Hill’ origins: a federation of semi-independent, democratic states securely united by an overarching ethos decreed by God.
Over the first half of the 19th century this mission gave rise to the concept of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ the God-given right to incorporate the whole of the North American land mass below Canada, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, into a cohesive federation of states all governed by the American Constitution. This was clearly articulated by the Eastern State Journal editor on 29 January 1846:
“Any President who sanctions the surrender of one foot of the Oregon territory… will be politically damned and anathemised by the American people…. Our claim to Oregon is still the best and strongest. And that claim is by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent, which providence has given for the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us.”
The issue of the indigenous people who settled on the land many thousands of years previously is not discussed in the article. Oregon became a US state in 1859.
The spirit of manifest destiny is encapsulated by the song America the Beautiful, written by Katherine Lee Bates in 1895.
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Civil war
In 1860/61, 11 of the southeastern states seceded from the Union, setting up their own ‘Confederacy’, citing a fundamental disagreement with the other states on the issue of slavery. The Confederacy was controlled by wealthy cotton, tobacco and rice plantation owners who used the slave labour of people who had been forcibly transported from Africa. They cited religious authority for this practice, claiming that the Bible did not condemn slavery, and petitioned for their right to self-determination through capitalist enterprise encapsulated in the American promise of liberty.
The Northern states remaining in the Union cited the promise within the Declaration of Independence, that the United States of America was rooted in a fundamental agreement that “all men are created equal”.
In his mid-Civil War Gettysburg address, President Abraham Lincoln said:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The North won the war, but Lincoln was subsequently assassinated by Southerner John Wilkes Booth, who alleged that he was a tyrant for removing the right to independent self-determination from the Southern states; a right, he proposed, that should have been protected under the Constitution.
This assertion was deeply rooted in different ‘takes’ on the founding fathers’ intentions for the US, and signalled that, while the North had been overwhelmingly victorious, the argument had not been settled. The sand that had originally been introduced into the constitutional oyster – the attempt to accommodate the rights of individual human beings and communities within the drive to pursue capitalist expansion to its greatest extent – had not been eliminated.
Disputed freedoms
The contemporary American Christian Right slowly germinated from the seed of the Confederacy. They no longer espouse slavery, but propose that the modern United States is moving away from its religious origins, and in doing so, is violating their rights under the first amendment of the constitution, which relates to the freedom of speech, action and religion. This reading of the constitution is, however, disputed.
“Members of the religious right, while often celebrating the political and religious freedoms guaranteed by the [first] amendment, also criticize those who interpret the amendment as providing absolute separation of church and state. Similarly, they often reject liberal interpretations of the amendment or other constitutional provisions that they think are responsible for undermining traditional moral values.”
The contemporary Christian Right are much of the driving force behind Trump’s recent rise to power. They are part of a coalition that not only focuses on a specific interpretation of religious freedom, but also upon an interpretation of constitutional rights in relation to individual liberty that embraces the unhampered power of capitalist enterprise.
The American dream
These ideals have most recently been formally expressed in the contemporary ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) political movement and its unofficial manifesto, Project 2025. Both also draw heavily upon the 20th-century meme of the ‘American Dream.’ The phrase was introduced by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America.
It refers to the ideal that all Americans, generation after generation, should be given the freedom and equality to achieve upward mobility, if they choose to work hard enough. But Truslow also communicated some misgivings:
“A system that steadily increases the gulf between the ordinary man and the super-rich, that permits the resources of society to be gathered into personal fortunes… is assuredly a wasteful and unjust system. It is, perhaps, as inimical as anything could be to the American dream.”
Or the American nightmare?
On 31 January, the richest man in the United States, Elon Musk, appointed by 47th President Donald Trump to head a new Department of Government Efficiency, sent aides into the offices of the US resources agency in Washington, to lock career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees. This is apparently part of Trump’s mission to “drain the swamp” of the “deep state”: approximately 50,000 civil servants who, he claims, tie up the government in red tape.
However, Reuters suggests that, besides reducing bureaucracy, a key aim is to install MAGA loyalists throughout the civil service. This is also suggested by Project 2025, which refers to the civil service as “woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America”, vowing to “defang and defund… career bureaucrats of the Administrative State [who] centralize power up and away from the American people”.
This echoes the spirit that removed an unelected King from the governance of thirteen overseas territories, and in this sense, Musk’s raids could be loosely compared to the Boston Tea Party. But will the placing of a socio-political 18th-century overlay on a 21st-century nation really ‘work’ in the same way? It seems that we are about to find out.
A civil war that never ends?
There are readings of history that suggest the Civil War never really ended. It is certainly true that the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s were fought on very similar lines. Trump’s signing of the executive order that dismantles American’s rights to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) suggests that he wishes to ignite this battle yet again. How this will work out, or even whether the order will ever pass into law is not yet clear, and such uncertainty is likely to continue for quite some time.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, gave African Americans and other minority ethnic groups the right to legally challenge discrimination and to demand equal rights and protections. However, the incoming Trump administration has raised issues of citizenship and culture that constrain the full application of these rights.
During the week before he left office, President Biden attempted to install female equality as a constitutional right under an Equal Rights Amendment proposed in 1923. However, there are various disputes over whether he had the authority to do this, given that not all the states had ever ratified it. Unsurprisingly, it currently appears the Trump government have a very different view of the situation, and may seek to renegotiate the amendment completely.
LGBTQ+ rights have become a heated topic of debate in the wake of the recent election, with respect to whether they are currently protected by the Constitution or not. Project 2025 directly challenges such rights, particularly with respect to transgender issues.
America reboots
In some ways, it is as though Trump pressed ‘factory reset’ on the US and reloaded its starter program. We will have to wait and see whether or not he will succeed in his attempt to install a concept of governance conceived by a small group of 18th-century revolutionists onto the most powerful nation in the world. The similarity to events outlined at the start of Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale is uncanny.
Historical reflection highlights the prominence of puritanical origins in the wholesale cancellation of DEI; manifest destiny in territorial claims made on Gaza, Greenland and Canada (and by extension, Musk’s ambitions to colonise Mars); the spirit of unhampered capitalism in tariff raising approaches to foreign policy and current plans to create a ‘Gaza Riviera’. The drive to ‘serve the common man’ can be observed in the attempt to remove an alleged ‘elite’ from the machinery of governance.
Whether American voters realised that their new administration was about to unleash this old/new political order on them, and whether they will accept its imposition on their 21st-century society is yet to be determined.
One thing is, however, clear: only Americans can decide how their nation proceeds from here. It is their future, and it is firmly rooted in their history. How it will unfold, and how the rest of the world will respond, is still being decided.
As Paul Simon pointed out in an earlier period of American unrest:
We come on the ship they call The Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune.
The rest of the world waits, watches and worries.
