Make America great again

[chickenfeet]

 "Make America great again" seems to be the near universal slogan of US politics from Saunders to Trump.  I actually don't really get it.  When was America great and what made it so?  What needs to change to make it great again?  Or is it just the same sort of weird ahistorical nostalgia of the sort that makes Nigel Lawson think the Irish should become sensible and rejoin the UK?

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

i have a feeling that in trump's case it simply means "make america the way it was before obama"

[chickenfeet]

Interesting. It's not like Obama has really changed all that much. I do like the idea of rolling back Citizens United and Hobby Lobby but I don't suppose that's what Trump has in mind!

[princessofgeeks]

I think a bunch of Trump supporters see a black man in the White House, see the existence of Obamacare and the ongoing mess that is Congress' failure to deal with some kind of compromise on immigration law and actually do sincerely believe that Obama ruined America.

[ironed_orchid]

For Trump and other right wingers I think it's probably about the myth of American exceptionalism, and like most myths, harkens back to an imaginary golden age when the rich could do whatever they wanted without fear of repercussions, and the poor could fall for get rich quick schemes that made them think that however bad things were now, they too could become rich at any moment.

So basically, y'know, a lot like now.

Sanders is probably trying to evoke stuff like the New Deal.

[chickenfeet]

I get the Sanders picture though I strongly suspect it's tied to the specifics of WW2 and it's aftermath in an essentially non-replicable way. The Trump "golden age" I just do not get unless, as Princessofgeeks suggests, it's simply the current mess minus Obamacare and plus a lot of hot air.

[ironed_orchid]

I think it's a nostalgic/imaginary view of how things were in the years before any big stock market crash.

But I mostly think it's imaginary.