“Tonight, I want to talk about what kind of future we are going to have, and what kind of Nation we are going to be. All of us, together, as one team, one people, and one American family. We all share the same home, the same heart, the same destiny, and the same great American flag. Together, we are rediscovering the American way.”
I know people are saying that Trump read his speech well last night, but I want to make the case for why the SOTU was actually quite frightening. I know I know, it sounded like pablum about the flag and the military and faith and families…but knowing that Stephen Miller was behind this, I think it’s worth trying to unpack the messages he was trying to send to his white nationalist base and the ideology behind this apparent pablum.
What is the content of this thing, “America,” that Trump spent so much time talking about? If we wanted to see it, touch it, feel it…where would we look? According to Trump, it is our same “home” (soil), our same “heart” (blood), and our same “destiny.” Destiny is a term white nationalists use obsessively…as in, their whole political project revolves around “securing a future” for “their people.” According to Trump, America is also centered in our “faith and family,” not “the government.”
So America is not a civic entity through which we govern ourselves, America is all of the private places that exist apart from our collective, civic life. Yet immediately after insisting that America is NOT it’s government, Trump then moved on to laud two institutions that wield theoretically legitimate violence on American citizens and people around the world on behalf of the American state — the police and the military. To sum up the contradictory “America” invoked in the speech, it is a shared heart and home (blood and soil), our (straight white) families and (straight white) churches but not our government…but also our government, but only the arms of it that inflict righteous violence on our behalf, primarily against non-white people.
But there’s one more key piece as to what America is, and this is the line that got the most rousing applause. America is “our flag.” What stood out to me was the extent to which “the flag” is a floating signifier. Trump didn’t talk about the ideals that flag stands for, the abstract principles of liberty and equality for which veterans have (at least rhetorically) fought and died. Trump calls for us to love the flag as both the ultimate symbol of who we are, but also an entirely empty symbol, hollowed out of any transcendent meaning. The flag Trump invokes is a symbol of pure tribalism, and a deeply racialized tribalism at that. After all, what are we to make of his potted version of American history in which “free people” occupied a “vast wilderness” and made it great?
At the risk of sounding old fashioned, I’m tempted to ask whatever happened to “the republic, for which it stands?” As far as we can tell from Trump’s SOTU, the flag has almost nothing to do with that republic…the republic through which we, the people, exercise our capacity for self-government. This pushing aside of “the republic,” i.e. our mechanisms of collective self-government, to associate the flag with Americans in their individual capacities, normative families, churches, blood, soil, the military, and the police is pretty much the definition of authoritarianism. The authoritarian seeks to delegitimize all forms of public, institutional power that threaten him, that could potentially constrain him. He masks this will to power by draping it in “the flag,” and by associating the flag entirely with himself and “the people” he supposedly embodies.