Expansionism and assimiliation: the Protestant "Destiny"?

I was perturbed by how much sense a lot of the things that Stephanson pointed about about protestantism and the development of the American state (and the "American spirit") made. His overall implication seems to be that the puritan, protestant ethic upon which our nation was "founded" has never died out in our history. It guided us into the west, then to the south, then to the north, then farther west and south into the oceans (all with religious rhetoric justifying the assimilation of foreign and therefore inferior races).

I had, however, never heard the speculation that prevalent in the minds of many manifest destineers was the eventual take-over of the East and a re-conquest of the lands of the Aryans, completing the historic circle around the globe, from east to west and back again finally to the east. That's the truly perturbing notion, and one that I have little problem believing was actually in the minds of many people. It's a global-conquest doctrine as bad if not worse than Hitlerism. We're talking about the massive assimilation of the entire human species under the auspices of white, protestant Christianity. And it was accepted as morally right even by some more progessive thinkers of the period.

I feel that I have to refute the claim made in class and in some earlier posts that "the expansionst spirit", that is, manifest destiny, has fallen by the wayside in the popular American consciousness. As an extention of the mechanisms of expansion discussed in the book (genocide, concentration, war, brainwashing, etc), I would have to add the mechanism of globalization and massive industrial capitalism. Though I'm far from being an anti-globalizationist, it's clear that globalization is, fundamentally, the embodiment of the PROTESTANT Work Ethic on a world-wide scale. It requires, necessarily in order to thrive and EXPAND, that all other forms of society die out. That they perish under the enormous wave of Western Capitalism. It's happened, and it's incredibly real. For me, that seems to be the ultimate MANIFESTATION of the western "DESTINY".