Joe Biden gives an interview to Tom Friedman and in the course of it utters this phrase: "I want to make sure we're going to fight like hell by investing in America first."
"America first." Well, what do you know. Here is the Washington Post, from January 2017: "President Trump's 'America First' slogan was popularized by Nazi sympathizers." Here is Bloomberg from 2016: "Trump's 'America First' Slogan Has Nazi Era Baggage": "For years this phrase was toxic. Pat Buchanan has used it from time to time, but "America first" and the idea it represented -- American neutrality towards the Nazis -- has been largely banished from respectable discourse. Now Trump is bringing the phrase back to the mainstream." The Atlantic, in 2017: "A Short History of 'America First': The phrase used by President Trump has been linked to anti-Semitism during World War II."
It'll be interesting to see whether the rest of the press accuses Biden of echoing Nazism or anti-Semitism by using the phrase "America first," or whether that treatment is reserved for Trump and other Republicans.
More broadly, you sometimes get the sense from the globalist left that prioritizing America's needs over that of the rest of the world is itself somehow unjust, unenlightened nationalist chauvinism. If Biden indeed intends to avoid that trap it will be encouraging. Some will argue that there is no real choice, that a prosperous and healthy world is good for America. There's some truth to that. It's also true, though, that in some cases America's interests conflict with those of our international rivals, enemies, competitors, or even allies, and in those cases the American president should be unapologetic about putting America's interests first. The concept tends to make progressives squirm, or at least make them uncomfortable. Perhaps that is partly because of the historical antecedents. I suspect too, though, that the discomfort is in part because these contemporary progressives are so thoroughly globalist in outlook that they find it difficult to justify on a moral or philosophical level the idea that what is good for Americans should take priority over what is good for people in France or Germany or South Africa or China or Egypt or anywhere else.
