Velshi: “Eddie, a couple of conversations ago you said, as it related to the FBI and the Department of Justice, we’ve been there before where things have not been good. And we decided as a society that we like, we like the way we do things now better. Ben’s making the point that on a global level, for 80 years, we’ve decided — more than that, really, for more than 100 years, we’ve decided we like the rule of law. We like territorial integrity. We like — we like systems that work. And Donald Trump apparently doesn’t.”
GLAUDE: “There’s always been an underbelly to that, to those commitments, though, because just, we could talk about the empire of right. We could talk about U.S. relation to the Philippines, to Cuba. We could talk about the moment in which Teddy Roosevelt imagines a certain kind of white Anglo-Saxonism that defines U.S. foreign policy. I’m talking about the end of the 19th and 20th century.”
Velshi: “Sure, yeah.”
GLAUDE: “So there is this sense in which Donald Trump is harkening back to a period —“
Velshi: “Right.”
GLAUDE: “— where the United States imagined itself as an imperial kind of force, kind of informed by its democratic principles, an ironic and contradictory sort of position. And it’s also the case, I want to say this, that there’s always been this tension between America as an idea and America as blood and soil. This is the distinction between good nationalisms and bad nationalisms, right? We think we’re driven by the Constitution. But there’s been an idea underneath it that this country must be, must be, and must always be a white nation. And that ideology has driven policy decisions. And what’s interesting about the current moment, we have a second gilded age. We have a reassertion of U.S. imperial power, and we have the latest articulation of white supremacy at the same time.”
