Over a hundred years ago, a German professor stated that socialism failed on American shores because of a surplus roast beef, apple pie, and free real estate on the American western frontier. It can perhaps equally be said that fascism failed on American shores because of a surplus roast beef, apple pie, and free real estate on the American western frontier.
Because at the heart of these two ideologies are ideas about economic distribution and who should get what. One emphasizes equality as a permanent goal to strive towards, and one emphasizes inequality and separateness as a permanent goal. In normal nation that has limits and boundaries, politics and economics are about making do with what one has. Compromises and decisions are based on these limits and a realistic expectation of moderate growth.
The reason the United States could avoid these two ideologies of distribution and limits is because it did not have to take redistribution seriously because the United States has no limits and will keep growing forever. On one end, we don’t need to rein in the wealthy because everyone will be wealthy! No one is poor, they are just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
On the other end of the income ladder, it is wrong to limit historically marginalized groups. They should not be discriminated against because they too can join in on this unending gravy train. “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” was the Republican slogan in the 1920s. In Louisiana, everyone is convinced Governor Huey Long said it first.
Either way, the United States used the frontier as an escape valve for social pressures to push out questions of distribution by having people move out to get new land to farm. When the frontier officially closed in 1890, the new frontier became export markets for the surplus of American goods that this new industrial colossus made with its new factories. There was a push into the Pacific with annexation of Hawaii, the opening up of Japan at gunpoint, and the forced Open Door policy with China. All of these were ways to force trade (American exports) into areas that did not have any American imports. Many American industrial and agricultural fortunes depended on selling stuff to places far away.
Societies that lost wars and faced defeat and economic ruin were forced to figure out how to distribute what was left over. Imperial Russia lost a war with Japan and then World War I and became the world’s first proclaimed socialist state based on the Bolshevik slogan of “Bread, Land, Peace.” Defeated Imperial Germany after World War I teetered between the Nazi Right and socialist and communist Left during the interwar era. We know who won that political argument in 1933.
Also relevant is the Spanish Second Republic of the 1930s which faced a civil war between the Catholic and monarchist right and the Socialist, Communist, Liberal, and Anarchist Left. Spain had lost all of its major colonies by 1898.
What unites these three nations who had to make these distributional decisions between the socialist left and the fascist right is that absence of colonies or a frontier to provide an outlet for expansionist impulses. The distribution of resources had to be decided here and now, not elsewhere in the world or imagination. France and England with their African and Asian colonies did not have to deal with these questions either in the same time period.
After World War II, the United States instituted an international trading order called the Bretton Woods system. This along with the creation of the predecessors to the European Union allowed international trade in an organized fashion but anchored in the hegemonic presence of the United States at the center. The American frontier had a controlled expansion east, west, north and south without a need for formal colonies.
It is forgotten today that John F. Kennedy called his domestic policy the New Frontier and outer space the Final Frontier. But the cracks were already beginning in Kennedy’s time as Japan and West Germany rebuilt and became export champions with aid of American consumers and the opening of the American market to prevent the regrowth of fascism in these two nations.
By 1970, the United States became a trade deficit nation as it was in the pre-Civil War Era. There was a brutal response at the top to prevent a slide down the totem pole.
Richard Nixon and John Conolly’s dismantling of the Bretton Woods system inaugurated our current economic order of budget deficits funded by trade deficits as our trading partners paid our credit card bills with the money we gave them for stuff we didn’t make. It was a sweet deal and boy those petrodollars returning from oil exporting nations into our own bond market helped extend this new frontier. This new frontier empire based on credit is now dissolving us into the hard questions Russia, Germany, and Spain faced in the early twentieth century.
Warning signs have been around for some time. Louisiana which was relatively less racist than its Deep South neighbors was cushioned by oil money and its long tradition of populist governors. When there is free money for everyone, why fight it out and be ugly like Mississippi and Alabama? When the oil boom busted, Louisiana’s bizarre election system ended up with a KKK member as a general election Republican nominee in 1991.
On a national stage, the first echo of an America-first Trumpism on a national stage was Pat Buchanan who ran for president against George H.W. Bush in 1992. He was stridently anti-immigrant and free trade. But the end of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc led to a new frontier of American financial expansion into a united Germany and Eastern Europe. This in addition to the new free, virtual real estate of the Internet led to the longest boom in American history. In this time period, South Africa, a settler-colonial society in some ways similar to the United States, exported one of its privileged children into that boom American economy to create PayPal and become the world’s richest man Elon Musk.
But there are hard limits to a frontier based on credit from developing nations which have a tendency to eventually…. you know…. develop. In 2008, the bills came due and the economy crashed and the People’s Republic of China and other developing nations had to power international, economic growth while the United States limped, and Europe fell down and never bothered getting up again.
After a few weak years, tax cuts and financial speculation powered the American economy as well as the absence of established alternatives for a while a new belief in unlimited growth extended into fantasies such as cryptocurrencies and the Metaverse and now artificial intelligence. One by one these virtual frontiers have had the air let of their tires as a growth outlet. Oh and no one wants to fly a Boeing plane anymore.
But now with the end of the frontier in terms of territory, export markets, and virtual land and commodities, the United States can become for once a grown up nation that has to ask realistic questions and decide a realistic distribution of resources in a nation that will not grow like it once did. China remembers the forced opening of trade done by the British, French, and Americans in the 1800s. And when their current president, who used to buy tractors in Iowa, decides not to buy soybeans in the Midwest because of tariffs, he is telling the United States it is time to grow up and make real decisions and compromises.
It is the end of the frontier fantasy and the beginning of very hard and very ugly internal conflict for the United States of America.
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