(edited: Feb. 22)
“America First”, a theme of the new Republican Administration, with strong support of the Democratic Party, is disturbing. Many of us were raised with values which strongly contrast with this idea.
I hate to enter into ideas tangential to religious thought, it turns off a lot of people, including myself. Many of us, however, were raised in religious households, and while we may have discarded religious dogma, the basic fundamental values of our religious upbringing shaped our approaches towards life.
For me, this included mostly a Roman Catholic upbringing, but also several years in a Fundamentalist Protestant environment where the study of scripture was a large part of the practice. Jesus was the example in these Christian environments. I don’t mean to ignore other religions with equally valid actors or themes; I simply do not have the knowledge or the space in this essay to address these other religions.
I think of Jesus as one of many human manifestations of a broader spirit or metaphysical force we will call Christ–a spirit we are free to adopt, or at least aspire to. Under this perspective, Jesus is my brother in the broader body of the spirit of Christ.
Christ, the spirit, consists of elements which oppose all violence, condemns wealth and power, emphasises love over hate, e.g., “love thy enemies . . . “, teaches care for the oppressed, the stranger, the outcast, ect. These are themes worthy of our aspirations.
America First takes our aspirations in the opposite direction; it is based on greed, political power, and self-centeredness, the opposite of the values of Christ, anti-Christ, if you will.
No one expects the U.S. to become the Christ of the world, but we would likely find a reversal of direction away from the anti-Christ forces of war, greed, and excessive self-obsession: elements of the America First concept, towards the concept of Christ as described above, would, paradoxically, better serve our interests. It would salvage our collective soul and benefit global humanity so as to avoid global warfare, increased poverty, migration, and the general degradation of the values of humanity.
America will only become its strongest, when, to the extent we are able, we follow the examples of Jesus, and other figures of a similar spirit, e.g., Tolstoy, MLK, Ghandi . . . . While these are religious figures, certainly there are numerous secular figures of similar persuasion, without religious attachment, whose behavior is equally worthy of emulation.
At a minimum the U.S. needs to learn to cooperate with other nations. This does not mean driving the hardest bargain in trade, or in economic, or military activities. It means a different approach where negotiators enter negotiations with a commitment to serve the interest of all negotiating parties, not to maximize our own material outcome, as the America First concept implies, but to maximize the overall outcome, for all global citizens, even if this means greater sacrifice from the U.S. and other nations better able to bear the sacrifice. This is certainly a cheaper alternative to war.
This does not imply the U.S. working classes need to engage in greater sacrifices, there is plenty excessive wealth and income among participants in the upper portions of the U.S. and other national economic structures to bear this burden. The short term profits in arms sales and other war potentialities, however, may prove too difficult for the ruling classes to resist. This is a structural issue and follows naturally from an economic ideology premised on greed.
Change will be difficult to achieve in our capitalist economy where short-term profits built on flawed entity specific accounting measures which fail to measure the negative impacts of corporate behavior, i.e., social, cultural, environmental, global . . . . But this goes to the heart of the issue which must be addressed.
This also is a roundabout way of stating that capitalism itself, with its entity and individual specific accounting measures, is an anti-Christ model as it is founded on excessive self-interest and elevates the material relative to the humane. This aligns perfectly with the America First concept and indeed, the concept is an outgrowth of the flawed ideological foundations of the capitalist economic model.
The above mentioned moral authorities, i.e., Jesus, Gandhi, MLK . . ., go beyond mere cooperation, as discussed here. Theirs, is a noble goal; many of us, as individuals, might attempt a similar commitment. In the meanwhile, as a nation, we can at the minimum recognize the evil path we currently embark upon towards global war. A moral premise based on the non-violent Christ concept can reverse our direction. While few of us are likely to attain or even desire Christ status, it is a noble ideal which can point us in right direction; it is the opposite of the America First concept.
The counter argument will be that other nations will not do likewise and will take advantage of those nations who attempt cooperative behavior. I do not accept this argument. Violence begets violence and cooperation begets cooperation. There are warmakers and peacemakers in all nations. The rise to power of peacemakers in one nation provides space for the rise to power of peacemakers in other nations. The opposite is also true.
The spirit of cooperation must be developed and grown. As we have witnessed the spirit of violence overcome humankind at an accelerated pace in recent decades, the same can be achieved of cooperative behavior in future decades–if we make a commitment to this ideal. Cooperation should be considered an investment; as stated earlier, this pathway would be much cheaper than than our current path towards global war.
The concept America First should be recognized for what it is: it is yet another crucifixion of Christ. It is based on greed and self-centeredness, and displays a lack of social consciousness prevalent in the above mentioned moral authorities and numerous others of similar persuasion–all, in a sense, participants, to a greater or lesser extent, in the Christ spirit or metaphysical force. The goal should be to develop a Christ consciousness, which will develop to a greater or lesser extent in each individual, but which collectively moves us towards global peace and away from the America First concept, which leads us closer to the hell of global war.