It began with Columbus's medieval quest for the land of Eldorado, the terrestrial paradise thought to be somewhere in Asia, the hope of refurbishing a New Jerusalem. It proceeds to John Winthrop's city on a hill, and transmogrifies into the temples of Mormonism. Somewhere along the line there is a decided shift from Hopkins' pursuit of spiritual happiness to Locke's preoccupation with real estate. World history, as a conquest of this Protestant messianic assault, has entered the dark age of toxic proliferation, which, we might say, is the direct offshoot, the successful enactment, of John Winthrop's city on a hill. The hills and valleys have mushroomed with cities, with the numberless tentacles of a driving technology reaching out and squeezing the life out of the land.
American expansionism is rooted in visionary thinking.
America, deep in its historical consciousness, is driven by powerful psychic forces, seen, for example, in the Mormonist, neo-Renaissance, self deification project. Mormonism was born around the time of the myth of Manifest Destiny, which also appeals to deep parts of the American psyche. At the time, the issue was the annexation of Texas. Woodrow Wilson, dreamer of an enlightened League of Nations, is a central figure here, a man who conceived the destiny of America in messianic terms. And there is no doubt that the messianic spirit lives on in American politics, even if it manifests itself in uninspired sloganeering, and even if the purity of its origins has been sullied by crass economic interest.