July 27, 2025.

On July 23rd, the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872

oil painting by John Gast titled American Progress.

Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting, with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships.

He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting, white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders.

Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook and a telegraph wire, being

laced on poles along a train track behind her. Over the reproduced image, the Department

of Homeland Security account wrote, A heritage to be proud of, a homeland worth defending.

From the time Gass painted it, American progress has been interpreted

as a representation of the concept of manifest destiny, the mid-19th century notion that God had

destined the people of the United States of America to spread democracy to the rest of at least

the North American continent, and possibly South America as well.

A number of people who saw the Homeland Security Post saw it as the Trump administration's embrace of that ideology.

Magazine editor John O'Sullivan coined the term Manifest Destiny in the July 1845 issue of Democratic

Review, a magazine dedicated to defining what it meant to live in a Democratic Republic.

O'Sullivan's concept of manifest destiny was different from the constant expansionism of Euro-Americans

before his time, in part because he was defending a specific

partisan policy. Congress's annexation of Texas in March 1845 and the apparent determination

of Democratic President James K. Polk to seize more territory from Mexico. The Democrats' political opponents, the Whigs, opposed the land grab,

and Democrats justified their position on the grounds that they were simply honoring God's plan.

The spread of democracy, and with it American greatness,

was both the right and the duty of Americans, they claimed, overriding

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