Actually, that argument is more like saying “We should have taken all of Mexico. The survivors’ descendants (whomever they might be) would be better off, today.”
The argument… (ummm, how do I put this appropriately to GD? Oh, yeah…) lacks rigor.
Why not? Admittedly slavery is even more oppressive than Manifest Destiny, but you’re making the same kind of argument.
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Irish-Americans benefited from the British policies and the Potato Famine that drove them out of Ireland, since they were ultimately better off here.
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Jewish-Americans benefited from Russian pograms that drove them out of Europe so they didn’t have to endure the Holocaust. (Yeah, Godwin. So sue me. It’s the same kind of argument.)
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Cuban-Americans benefited from the Castro Revolution because they ended up better off economically by being forced to move to the US. (They’re probably better off than they would have been even if Cuba hadn’t become Communist, given the example of the Dominican Republic.)
Manifest Destiny was simply not a concept that was intended to benefit Mexicans or other Latin Americans, and in its implementation was detrimental to them. To claim that it wasn’t so bad because some later benefited from it just isn’t a valid argument.
In fact, it was proposed by some that we should take all of Mexico after the Mexican War, not just half of it. The idea failed because the US didn’t really want Mexicans, just Mexican territory. So we took the part of the country with the fewest Mexicans, and left out the part that was densely populated. This puts the lie to the idea that Manifest Destiny was something intended to benefit all mankind; it really was just for whites.
For you, maybe. It’s not hard for Mexicans to imagine it. I think that this just demonstrates how hard it is for you to view this from anything other than a narrow US perspective.
Manifest Destiny was a general term that comprised of a variety of viewpoints. While it was true that the initial use of the term by John O’Sullivan mainly referred to the spread of the US form of government, he did specifically mention Anglo Saxons as the ones who were spreading it, so there was a racial component from the very beginning.
Whatever the initial idea, in practice Manifest Destiny became a racial concept. You can’t exclude this legacy from the connotations of the term today.
This is not my interpretation alone, it’s a common view among historians.
From here:
From here:
From here:
“Colonization” was inappropriate because it’s not a slogan.
“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” was inappropriate because it was in French, and most Americans don’t recognize it in that form. The appropriate comparison would be “Let Them Eat Cake.”
Cal, with all due respect, now you’re just bullshitting. I think you’re just continuing to argue because you don’t want to concede that your initial viewpoint was due to ignorance of the issues involved.
Seeing as how the economic value of the south’s slaves was wiped out by the Civil War, I wouldn’t say any of us have benefited or are benefiting. Unless there’s some major infrastructure that slaves built somewhere that I’m not aware of.
I never claimed that America’s desire to control territory in the west was intended to benefit Latinos. It was intended to benefit America. But if you are Latino, you could do worse than living in America. And it’s not like they were forever barred from residing in that territory; there’s certainly no shortage of Mexicans in the southwest. They just have to live there under the jurisdiction of the US government.
Why yes, we did want their wide expanses of sparsely populated territory. That was a major point in favor of going to war with them. It’s called imperialism. It was in style at the time.
Why would I want to view this from anything but the US perspective? I’m an American. I consider the fact that we gained that territory to be an unequivocal positive for my country. I’m not going to shed tears for Mexico over a war they lost more than 160 years ago. You might as well ask me to bemoan Paraguay’s loss of territory, or the lack of an independent Kurdish nation, or the destruction of the Republic of Novgorod.
And you missed my point, which was simply that the last 160 years of world history would look very different if the United States had not expanded to the Pacific.
The views of these historians don’t establish that the aim of American westward expansion was the waging of a race war. The aim was to seize territory. And our expansion required quite a bit of political wrangling, so it’s not surprising that proponents of expansion would appeal to certain retrograde views that were common at the time. That doesn’t mean racism was our primary impetus.
Ultimately, my views are informed by my unwillingness to condemn past societies for seeking to aggressively expand their territories. It’s a common aim of human societies, because controlling vast areas of land is part of what makes a nation great, and there are undeniable advantages to living in a secure and powerful nation. I see no reason to feel shame over that.
Oversimplified version: slavery -> Jim Crow -> different starting conditions for white and black Boomers -> different starting conditions for white and black Xers etc.
I don’t, perhaps, benefit directly from slavery (as the cliche goes, my family wasn’t even in this country then) but I benefit from being white in a country that has a legacy of race-based chattel slavery.
ETA: when I say “Jim Crow” I don’t mean to imply this was only in the South. And none of this is meant to imply that actual racism doesn’t still exist.
Imagine these on T-shirts:
“Lebensraum”
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.”
That you see a white-centered store like The Gap selling “Manifest Destiny” shirts to its white patrons as inoffensive–as dry, boring history–shows how defective your understanding is. You really think people are supposed to be OK with the idea that you will grow at their expense?
The thing is, we don’t know if The Gap meant it to be an Anglo-supremacist slogan, or if they just thought it sounded cool and could be stripped of historical meaning. Or if they thought it didn’t matter because no one could possibly object to an Anglo-supremacist slogan, the supremacy of the USA being a self-evident* fait accompli.*
I tend to suspect 3 with a side of 2. White people don’t often think about Manifest Destiny, let alone what it means (and for all the white people who are about to post to say they think about MD all the time: congratulations, you’re better than everyone, here’s your medal). The people who run Gap, being white people, therefore assumed no one thinks about what it really means.
I don’t see how any reasonable person could see the slogan as anything but offensive.
Granted, many people seem to have no problem venerating the Confederacy and it’s symbols which are at least as offensive.
I would argue pure 2, only because kids of a certain generation heard the line every Saturday morning during cartoons with SchoolHouse Rock. If you we’re a white kid growing up in the 'burbs, you might not have ever made a connection between generic American expansionism and a racialially tinged rallying cry.
We don’t sit and bitch about Little House on the Prairie, even though the Wilders would never have had their farm if the Natives hadn’t first lost 90% of their population from disease and later made a series of both tactical and strategic mistakes when dealing with Western European colonists.
I chalk this one up to ignorance, and in a separate bucket from the “Two Wongs make a White” shirt.
[bolding mine] Is that because you think the violent oppression of the Kurds is ancient history, or because you just don’t care about what happens to people who aren’t Americans?
I don’t think I care much for MOIDALIZE.
It’s because I think the Kurds are losers.
No skin off my balls.
I’ll buy that as the explanation for everyone at the company missing the possibility of it being offensive, but the designer’s tweet (manifest destiny: survival of the fittest), after the controversy erupted, rather strongly implies an actual racist intent that he hoped to sneak by management.
Good point - only possible I can think of is he the designer played a lot of Oregon Trail and was referring to who made it without dying of dysentery.
Tell this to Schoolhouse Rock. My favorite SR song. 
Why must you insist that there be a racist motive in all this? Pigheaded patriotism, sure, but where’s the racism?
Or is the fact that brown people got beat by a superior national power ages ago something we have to wring our hands over in conspicuous displays of white guilt?
So when you said:
your point wasn’t that all of these things happened a long time ago, but that they happened to people who aren’t Americans and who you thus hold in contempt.
I see little difference between your brand of patriotism and racism.
That’s because there isn’t any.
You don’t have to beat your chest about every past injustice committed by your long dead countrymen but if you insist they did nothing wrong then that’s pretty much giving yourself permission to wage wars of conquest today.
Racism was a very big part of the theft of our land. And ironically it also saved our country. The idea was to take as much of our land as possible while incorporating the least amount of our people as we were viewed as racially inferior. Some wanted to take over the whole country while other more rabid racists were afraid of absorbing so many “mongrels” into a white European country. Luckily in an ironic way, the latter won the argument.
*"It was in 1845 that jingoistic journalist John O’Sullivan coined the phrase “manifest destiny” when he wrote that “[o]ur manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Together with many other European Americans, O’Sullivan argued that the United States government had a mandate to teach the North American way of life to “backward” peoples such as Mexicans and Native Americans.
However, during and after the Mexican-American war, as the debates over the incorporation of Mexican territory increased, some white southerners were concerned that too many of these mixed-race people might be brought into the United States. During congressional debates over annexing Mexican territory, prominent Senator John C. Calhoun argued that the United States had never “incorporated into the Union any but the Caucasian race. . . . Ours is a government of the white man. . . . in the whole history of man . . . there is no instance whatever of any civilized colored race, of any shade, being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government.” In his view, as well as that of other whites, the “colored and mixed-breed” Mexicans were unacceptable in the “free” United States."*