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Even more notable than Trump's somnambulant delivery is his rapid fire use of a panoply of seemingly innocuous terms like "culture, values, destiny, legacy, greatness, and patriots" that have come to have much currency on the far right in the US and around the world.
From what I've heard from Trump's UN speech today, it seems to amplify several themes that animated his 1st SOTU in 2018. Assuming Steven Miller wrote both of them, the continuities here should alarm those who believe in liberal, constitutional democracy. medium.com/@sethcotlar/to…
This is "blood and soil" nationalism pure and simple that he's talking about here, or at least that's how Steven Miller (who was compatriots with Richard Spencer at Duke) knows terms like "destiny, culture, and globalists" will be heard by Trump's white nationalist supporters.
"And GOP voters anointed Trump, & said unto him, ye shall make America a beacon to the world, radiating dog whistled antisemitism, grumpy old man get off my lawn-ism, know nothing isolationism, and sabre rattling Islamophobia that shall draw scorn unto our land for generations."
"But the libs shall be righteously owned, and for that, you will be showered with myrrh and jet fumes of many colors, and your minions in the temples of power will bow before you, even tho when your back is turned it will be pelted with cryptic bible passages & furrowed brows."
I mean, it's not like they're trying to hide it or anything. And don't even get me started on Trump and Kushner's many, many deals across the globe. 
This is the sort of chauvinistic nationalism that unleashed innumerable 19th and 20th century wars and which the UN was designed to soften. For America to double down on this crap at this historical moment is, for lack of a better word, very bad.
Even more galling is that these dipsh*ts claim to be the defenders of "western civilization," as if that tradition doesn't have a long history of celebrating cosmopolitanism (the positive synonym of "globalist").
Denis Diderot (a leading figure of the Enlightenment which these conservatives claim to love) in 1770: "I prefer my family to myself, my country to my family, the human race to my country.”
Thomas Paine (1793): "Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; MY COUNTRY IS THE WORLD, and my religion is to do good."
In 1793 an American writer in a Philadelphia newspaper urged readers to divest themselves of “partial prejudices respecting nations, names, & colors” & to work to “advance the increasing welfare of the human species of every class w/o exception, in all the quarters of the globe.”
Sure, chauvinistic nationalism is a major thread in American culture and politics too...but it's merely one note out of many. The people who have doubled down on cultural versions of "Americanism" have rarely been the figures we remember favorably.
Anyway...Chapters 2 & 3 of this book I wrote a decade ago explore how people in the 1790s battled over the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism in the first decade of the new nation's existence.
tl;dr, it was complicated. books.google.com/books?id=oRgIW…
tl;dr, it was complicated. books.google.com/books?id=oRgIW…
