Manifest destiny today

We talked a lot in class last week about "What is manifest destiny?" Stephanson's answer to this question is pretty simply that manifest destiny is a US-specific ideology of physical expansion.

But is this ideology still alive today? There's certainly no mass movement of settlers to contiguous land belonging to the government. The government no longer has a policy of buying or otherwise acquiring land - in fact, popular opinion against imperialism is still alive and well, as some critiques of the Iraq war and similar conflicts have accused the government of "expansionist" or "imperialist" actions. And certainly there's no longer a religious, pseudo-scientific justification for expansion, based on the racial superiority of a homogenous Anglo-Saxon population civilizing or annihilating "lower" races.

It's particularly this last justification that seems ludicrous and outdated by today's standards. And certainly, though the US has some serious race issues, those problems are by no means the worst in the international arena, and it's common to boast about the US "melting pot" where any man (or woman) can "pull themselves up by the bootstrap" to get to the top.

However, public opinion and government policies still operate on an ideology of "we're better than you" to justify our actions. Is spreading democracy to Iraq, "civilizing" the Middle East through military aggression, that different from taking over parts of Mexico in the belief that our race will naturally take over theirs?

The premise is certainly more moral; I'd agree democracy is a good thing, while racial superiority is pure bunk. But is the firm conviction that our way of doing things is better than theirs, and the desire to give or force that way of doing things onto other people, a good or a bad thing? Isn't it the modern continuation of the spirit of manifest destiny, only cleaned up for a bit for the 21st centurey?