Manifest Destiny: Phase 1 & Phase 2

Created with the assistance of ChatLLM

Using current news stories and data, Manifest Destiny is being revisited as a powerful on influence contemporary culture and public policy in America.

Social Alchemy treats history as more than a list of events. It is a study of how perception shapes human action, social policy, and institutional design. This page looks at Manifest Destiny as a recurring pattern in that process — not just a 19th‑century slogan about settling the American West, but an ongoing way of seeing the world that still guides laws, borders, markets, and algorithms today.

When a culture decides that its story is natural, inevitable, and universal, it begins to treat other peoples as resources, problems, or proofs of its own virtue. That is the core of Manifest Destiny. The details change, but the pattern remains.

Phase 1: Territorial & Frontier Manifest Destiny

Phase 1 is the age of land: the period when Manifest Destiny operated through frontiers, maps, and physical conquest.

The dominant perception was simple and powerful:

The United States is destined by God, Providence, or History to expand.
Expansion brings “civilization,” “order,” and “progress.”
Indigenous nations, Mexicans, enslaved Africans, and Asians exist at the margins of that story — as obstacles, wards, or labor.

Key Mechanisms in Phase 1

Military conquest and removal
Wars and forced treaties moved borders westward and removed Indigenous peoples from their homelands.
Land distribution systems
Homesteading, railroad grants, and settlement policies converted taken land into private property and investment.
Explicit racial hierarchies in law
Slavery, segregation, Chinese exclusion, anti‑miscegenation laws, and racialized citizenship created a legal ladder of belonging.
“Civilizing” institutions
Missionaries, boarding schools, and assimilation policies claimed to uplift, while erasing languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions.

Perception and Human Action in Phase 1

Once the public accepted the idea that expansion was natural and righteous, brutal actions could be reframed as necessary steps in a larger story:

Displacement became “opening new lands.”
Forced schooling became “education.”
Resource extraction became “development.”

Perception created permission. The story of Manifest Destiny turned violence, dispossession, and racial hierarchy into normal and even heroic behavior. That story still sits under today’s maps, property regimes, and wealth distribution.

Phase 2: Institutional & Algorithmic Manifest Destiny

Phase 2 is the age of institutions, narratives, and data. Formal empires have ended, and explicit racial language has been pushed out of most laws. But the underlying perception remains: the United States (and the wider “West”) is the natural center of order, security, and innovation. Others appear as threats, clients, or background.

The language has changed from “civilizing the frontier” to “protecting security,” “defending merit,” and “treating everyone the same.” Yet the effects often track the old lines of race, class, and geography.

Key Mechanisms in Phase 2

1. Lawfare and Narrative Inversion

Laws that were written to protect vulnerable groups are now sometimes used to limit their ability to repair harm.

In one recent case, an anti‑KKK law from 1871 was used to attack a Black‑only alumni scholarship at a public university. The statute was originally passed to fight white supremacist terror against Black citizens during Reconstruction. It is now being repurposed to argue that a small, targeted scholarship for Black students is a form of discrimination.
Supreme Court rulings have ended race‑conscious admissions while speaking in the language of “individual rights” and “colorblind equality.”
In several states, “anti‑DEI” and “anti‑woke” bills seek to restrict diversity programs, ethnic studies, and equity initiatives in schools and universities.

Here, perception flips the script: those seeking to repair historical damage are framed as the new oppressors, while long‑standing advantages are recast as neutral or deserved.

2. Immigration, Security, and the New Frontier

Instead of taking physical territory, Phase 2 manages who may cross borders and under what conditions.

Immigration bans and benefit freezes have targeted clusters of poorer, conflict‑affected, or Muslim‑majority countries. These actions are framed as neutral responses to crime, terrorism, or “illegal immigration.”
Countries affected often depend on U.S. aid, remittances, and security cooperation, limiting their ability to respond. The pattern resembles an updated form of dependence: states are not colonized, but their mobility and access are tightly managed.
Domestically, each crisis involving a foreign national can produce broad restrictions for millions of people from the same region, treated as a “risk group.”

Again, perception leads: if the public accepts that certain nations are inherently dangerous or unstable, sweeping policies feel like common sense, even when they function as collective punishment.

3. Education and the Battle Over Memory

Manifest Destiny in Phase 2 also operates through control of knowledge and curriculum.

Proposals to weaken or dismantle the federal Department of Education would shift power to more fragmented, often more politicized structures, and reduce national civil‑rights enforcement in schools.
Curriculum and book bans target discussions of race, gender, and historical violence, narrowing what young people are allowed to learn about how the present was built.

If the story of how the country was made cannot be told fully, then present‑day inequities appear to have no history. They become personal failures or unfortunate accidents, rather than the lived consequences of earlier choices.

4. Algorithms and Financial Systems as Invisible Frontiers

Today, many frontiers are not physical at all. They exist in code and compliance systems:

Border agencies use algorithms to score the risk of travelers and asylum seekers.
Police departments deploy predictive systems that concentrate surveillance in already over‑policed neighborhoods.
Banks and payment providers apply complex “know your customer” and anti‑money‑laundering rules that affect people from “high‑risk” countries far more than others.

These tools are often presented as neutral and technical. But they are trained on data produced inside older power structures, so they tend to silently reproduce those structures. The frontier line is now a risk score or a compliance flag, but the result is familiar: some bodies and some passports move easily; others meet hidden walls.

From Frontier to Algorithm: What Hasn’t Changed

Seen through the lens of Social Alchemy, Phase 1 and Phase 2 are two expressions of the same underlying pattern:

A dominant group believes its story is universal and destined.
It builds laws, institutions, and technologies around that belief.
Those systems quietly teach everyone else how to see the world — who is normal, who is dangerous, who is repairable, and who is disposable.

Phase 1 worked through visible frontiers: land surveys, forts, homesteads, segregated neighborhoods. Phase 2 works through invisible frontiers: admissions criteria, immigration categories, risk models, content filters.

In both phases, perception is active, not passive. The stories people tell about themselves become infrastructure. They guide where armies march, where money flows, which lives are protected, and which losses are quietly absorbed.

Why This Matters for Social Alchemy

The purpose of Social Alchemy is not to fuel outrage or despair. It is to give readers tools to see patterns early, before they harden into fate.

When a policy is presented as neutral – a scholarship rule, an immigration ban, a security upgrade, a curriculum change, a new AI system – we can ask a few grounding questions:

Whose movement is being restricted? Across borders, schools, financial systems, or digital spaces.
Who is prevented from naming and repairing harm? Are targeted communities allowed to create their own institutions and supports, or are those efforts treated as suspicious?
Who profits from new layers of risk, surveillance, or scarcity? Which companies, agencies, or political groups gain influence, contracts, or narrative power?
What story makes this feel reasonable? Is it a story of destiny, security, merit, or tradition that hides older debts?

These questions do not tell us what to believe. They reopen perception so that human action is no longer on autopilot.

Social Alchemy exists in that space: between pattern and choice. By watching how Manifest Destiny has moved from the frontier into the courtroom, the border, the school, the marketplace, and the algorithm, we can begin to imagine different stories — and different futures — than the ones we were handed.