Head-on | White Christian nationalism can return America to its Third World roots

United States President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is a throwback to the foundational years of America. In the 1880s, a full century after it became independent, the US was what would today be called a Third World nation. Between the 1900s and 1930s, White Ku Klux Klan mobs roamed the streets of US cities lynching Black Americans at will and hanging their corpses from trees.

Poverty was widespread. According to measuringworth.com, which tabulates global historical data, US GDP in 1900, adjusted in today’s dollars, was a mere $21.19 billion. The US, 124 years after Independence, was far poorer than Britain, France and Germany.

Colonialism had elevated European powers to First World status in the 1800s after suffering centuries of medieval plague and penury. Compared to them, the US in 1900 was Third World. The two world wars between 1914 and 1945 elevated the US to First World status within a generation. Its GDP jumped from $36.83 billion in 1914 to $228,007 billion in 1945 — a leap of over 600 per cent in 31 years.

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War served America well. Its leaders were quick to grasp this. During the Second World War, US factories were manufacturing a bomber aircraft every two hours. Over 80 per cent of weapons and munitions used on the battlefields of Europe during WW2 came from America.

A lucrative military-industrial complex (MIC) was born along with companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and General Dynamics which would form the bedrock of US military power. An economy that had been hit by a deep decade-long depression from 1929 to 1939 roared to life.

America, finally, had left behind its Third World foundations.

Social and racial remnants though persisted. Black US citizens did not get the universal right to vote till the 1964 Voting Rights Act was passed into law. Lynchings of Blacks had stopped but racial segregation in the southern states continued. The 1965 Civil Right Act provided Black Americans protection from official discrimination for the first time though racism, often expressed violently, was rampant.

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Trump’s MAGA movement has recaptured many elements of the US as it was a century ago: deeply racist and using invasive foreign wars to build its economy.

Mainstream Republican politicians today brazenly employ racist rhetoric to demean “Third World” countries in Asia, Africa and South America, positioning the US as a Christian nationalist country. Their rhetoric is amplified by others.

Nazi sympathiser and White supremacist Nick Fuentes has a large following amongst Christian American nationalists. Fuentes has taken over the mantle of White supremacist Charlie Kirk, a Trump confidant, who was assassinated earlier this year.

In a post targeting last week’s Thanksgiving dinner hosted by Vice President JD Vance and his Indian-origin wife Usha, Fuentes mocked the couple: “See if you can spot the differences. There are two white people present at this Thanksgiving dinner, and there are 24 Indian or East Asian people with brown skin, brown hair, brown eyes, dressed in indigenous garb. I am pretty sure that the first Thanksgiving was actually not between Europeans and real Indians from India. I think it was with indigenous Americans.”

Referring to a red-coloured drink at the dinner, Fuentes added: “Could you imagine they have this pitcher. It’s like those drinks they make on the streets in India, where they are grabbing fistfuls of ice and rubbing it in their armpits and throwing it in there and mixing up the flies.”

Trump has meanwhile threatened Venezuela militarily on the pretext of it being a source of narcotic drugs entering the US. American forces have killed hundreds of people in boats suspected of drug trafficking. One such case has now attracted global attention.

The matter is under investigation by a bipartisan Congressional House Committee on whether the attacks on boats in neutral waters under the orders of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth constitute a violation of international law.

The Washington Post reported last week that Hegsetth had ordered defence department officials to “kill everybody” on a boat sailing off the Caribbean. The boat was under US surveillance.

In a scathing report, The Guardian wrote: “During the operation, led by the elite counter-terrorist group Seal Team 6, a first missile strike left two survivors clinging on to the wreck, the Post reported. Admiral Frank M ‘Mitch’ Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, reportedly ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors to comply with Hegseth’s orders. To date, more than 80 people have been killed in the series of US military strikes, targeting at least 22 more boats.”

A country can’t be labelled Third World or First World based only on economic or wealth parameters. Social and democratic parameters must be factored. Based on wealth, Qatar and Saudi Arabia would be classified as First World. Both countries are dictatorial monarchies, without an independent judiciary or media and with ties to terrorist groups. The labelling would therefore be false.

In contrast, a relatively poor country which has strong democratic norms and an independent media and judiciary cannot be labelled Third World. The US MAGA universe does not grasp this distinction.

For a nation founded on massacres of Native Americans and centuries-long African slave ownership, the lurch towards racism under Trump is not surprising.

As the biopic on Trump The Apprentice released last year showed, Trump’s early real estate career in New York was marked by corruption and racism. These are traits of a Third World country. Without meaning to, Trump is reminding the world of America’s foundations — and returning the US to those roots.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)