MAGA? Impossible, and Here's Why

“Make America Great Again” is a splendid political slogan, because, I think, almost everybody thinks we used to be better. So it strikes me as useful to examine what might be implicit in that slogan, and what we would do if we really wanted to make it happen.

If America’s not great anymore, when was it great? Let’s look at some history, measured in presidencies. Remember, we’re talking about the greatness of the country, not the presidents; they just represent historical periods.

This lost period of greatness, then: Was it when George Washington was president? We had grand ideals, expressed with sublime elegance in our founding documents. We also had slavery, subjugation of women, and some manner of servitude for everyone except well-to-do white men.

Skip forward to Abraham Lincoln. Enough said.

Okay, Theodore Roosevelt. He was a great reformer, but why? Because we’d enmeshed ourselves in the Gilded Age, a period exceeded only by our own in its egregiously asymmetrical, unjust, and unsustainable distribution of wealth and income. Some of that got straightened out, but accompanying the change was a period of unabashed imperialism.

Woodrow Wilson? This was an era of progress on several fronts and victory for the Allied forces in the Great War. It also saw the great Eugene V. Debs imprisoned on charges brought under the Espionage Act for opposing U.S. participation in the war. It was the time of Jim Crow, and of massively lethal race riots in Chicago and Elaine Arkansas.

Franklin Roosevelt. Grand times, I guess, other than the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Harry Truman. The Marshall Plan was pretty great, wasn’t it? But then it followed Nagasaki.

Eisenhower. Tremendous economic growth, the growing roots of the civil rights movement, and a dull, hard, stiff-upper-lip approach to every problem — to the few, that is, that could be acknowledged. Unrest everywhere, the Beat Generation setting the stage for flower power.

On, then, to Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Global cultural, economic, and military power perhaps unparallelled in human history. The fullest expressions yet of the civil rights movement, and a burgeoning women’s movement. A strong labor movement. A top marginal tax rate twice today’s, and a delta between CEO and average worker pay barely a tenth of today’s. The world’s best healthcare system, best public education, best private education, best transportation system, greatest manufacturing base, and a Congress that was both wise and, mostly, responsible. But the stagflation, and the frustration that set up the decline which began with nearly everything Ronald Reagan and a compliant Congress did.

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton? Peace, but for Bush’s misadventure in Iraq. A widening gap in the distribution of wealth and income, only slightly affected by Clinton’s moderation. Arthur Laffer’s supply-side economics, scarcely distinguishable from Larry Summers’ and Robert Rubin’s neoliberal charade. A dot-com boom, followed by the dot-com bust. Carefully groomed alliances with our Western allies, but also with Israel, maintaining a precarious, unsustainable balance in the Middle East. Utter failure to even attempt dealing seriously with the looming extinction caused by climate change.

So: What period would you return to, if you wanted to make America great “again?” History, I submit, is quite a mixed bag, and anyway, you cannot repeat it.

So the atavistic sentiment expressed in Donald Trump’s famous slogan is false. We never were as great as he seems to think, but we’ve had our moments and our successes. To taste those moments again is not to repeat any of them, but to repeat the work and the ethos — the generosity of spirit and the extensions of liberty, the acceptance of responsibility and the great, heaving efforts of change — that have occasionally characterized this country. Go back? Never. Donald Trump does nothing so aggressively as retreat. He wants to live on ground that used to lie behind us, ground where robber barons, white men all, went unchallenged. That ground, though, has eroded into the river of time, thank goodness and Ida B. Wells.

If that seems a bit high-flown and abstract, let’s get down to the practical realities. Some Americans would have us go back to the time of slavery. Some would have us go back to a highly progressive tax system. Some would bring back red-baiting, while others would resurrect the Equal Rights Amendment. You can’t have it all, nor does anybody want it all. So this is one of those at-the-crossroads speeches. Choose your moment in history. Scream it at the world, come November.