3 - “America First”

Summary

During Trump’s presidency, “America First,” a slogan once associated with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee (AFC) (1940–1941) to prevent US participation in World War II, returned to the center of American political discourse. This chapter argues that the AFC’s anti-interventionist foreign policy and proximity to mimetic fascist groups such as the German Bund is distorted by the labels “isolationist” and “populist.” Instead, by tracing the history of the slogan to the 1880s, this chapter restores the short-lived AFC and more recent iterations since 2016 to the longue durée history of American nativism and nationalism. The slogan “America First” has endured because it offers answers to perennial American questions about national identity and action: both ‘who are we?’ and ‘how should we act in international affairs?’ The chapter defines the America First tradition as an expression of a fascist politics of national identity rooted in American history and not merely a copy of twentieth-century interwar European models. Challenging diffusionist theories of fascism, it contributes to theoretical discussions of fascism as a global, diasporic, and living political tradition.