Making Sense out of Imperial Ambition

I was in the bookstore last week looking at options for a new read, when I glanced at ML Wang’s Blood over Bright Haven.  Reading the jacket, I was struck by the pastiche of current themes -- the underdog at the academy meets the displaced nomad.  Like much of the fantasy genre, the book ultimately promised a meditation on contemporary culture.  Looking at the key themes at play, I had a sense for the narrative challenges that the Trump Administration is trying to work through.  Through this lens, 2025’s seemingly disjointed fascinations with reconquest (Greenland, Panama, Gaza) and deconstructing wokeness form a weird coherence.  Where 2017 Trump channeled Andrew Jackson, 2025 Trump is channelling Frederick Jackson Turner.

Take it as a given that contemporary American social order has a problem -- blowing off the steam that is the very real human desire to succeed.  Whether from the outside (immigration) or inside (addressing the needs of the American subaltern), there is a sense that America has not yet figured out how to release the pressure placed on the social order by the need for a narrative of success.  Contrast Wang (and JK Rowling) with Trump here.  Where Trump frames internal success through the accumulation of wealth and status, the genre of Academy book- even the broader social myth of a meritocracy- imagines an institutional way for people to prove themselves and, by so doing, reshape the social structure from the inside.  The irony, of course, is that Academy narratives all get lumped into fantasy because human institutions are neither stable enough nor fair enough to serve this purpose.  But the critical impulse remains the same — the modern American hero journey is a narrative of reconstruction within the polis.

A fundamental truth for Trump and the MAGA ideology is that framing the hero journey as a narrative of social reconstruction is tearing us apart.  The conservative vision sees this narrative, and the notion of the equitable meritocracy more broadly, as destructive to the social order without a coherent alternative.  2025’s response to the liberal narrative has been typically Trumpian — eradicate the pathways the left has built towards social reorganization.  Close the borders, end DEI, freeze the social order.  Viewed uncharitably and from the perspective of the subaltern, this is just racism.  Viewed charitably, MAGA wants to give America time to heal from the social upheavals of the 20th and 21st century by holding everything in place for a while.  Unfortunately, even Trump knows that his alternative strategy is bound to fail; getting rid of a stuck pressure valve doesn’t make the pressure go away.

Trump, more than anyone, is driven to tell stories of himself as a success.  And while 2017 Trump may have believed that Jacksonian tribalism could quell internal dissent, 2025 Trumpism takes into account the more fundamental problem — the need for a new narrative.  Turner’s argument was that during the nineteenth century, America managed this problem through the assimilation of the American West.  However, with the closing of the frontier, America would either need to open new frontiers by global expansionism or it would tear itself apart.  Trump has accepted this gauntlet and has turned back to neo-colonialism for the same purpose.  And, taking into account the exigencies of our national self interest, has set his sights on the Northern wilderness, and points of global despair — Gaza and the Darien Gap.  Left unsaid is the attempt to reframe the hero journey — Trump’s 21st century success story will be recolonizing the world’s trouble spots in our own image.

The problems with this strategy are open and apparent.  Of course, Trump is ignoring the equivalence, even the humanity, of people outside his tribe of real Americans.  That’s a given for all of us by now.  Like Vietnam, the people who will ultimately have to execute the Neo-Colonial Golden Age are not the same people who will benefit from this success.  And even Trump knows that these types of Imperial aspirations inevitably fail painfully.  Gaza should be reminder enough.  

But the fact that Trump has resorted to imperialistic wishful thinking only reinforces how real the underlying problem is.  The left would say that we need to confront the need to reconstruct and do the hard work of building a more equitable society.  But that ignores a very real component of human nature. We ultimately treat success as a zero-sum game, and if success is measured by internal reordering, we will constantly be trying to tear ourselves apart.  And we all need narratives of success to channel our ambition and drive us forward.  Strange as it is to end on this note, I think in this respect, JFK, Elon and the oligarchs had it right;  we need a new frontier to conquer.  Onward to Mars.