The Two Faces of American Greatness
However historians judge Donald Trump after he leaves the White House, we will have to give him credit for turning a slogan of eight syllables into both the guiding purpose of his campaigns and the movement that twice helped elect him president. “Make America Great Again” manages to evoke a better, if shrewdly unspecific, past as well as the longing for a powerful nation whose government does exceptionally good things for its citizens. All that, and it fits neatly on a baseball cap.
Most progressives, historians or not, cringe at the slogan and believe it captures something vital and malevolent that drives Trump’s words and policies. MAGA allegedly looks kindly on the routine brutalities of the Jim Crow era and a time when women had to defer to men and queer folks had to keep the closet door tightly shut. Yet, I still believe it’s critical to take the longing behind Trump’s master slogan to heart. Liberals and leftists know the nation is in serious trouble—racked by bitter cultural and partisan divisions, widespread fears about the future of jobs in an AI-driven economy, and a despotic leader who grants no legitimacy to his opponents. In this environment, the desire for better times should not be condemned as just a bigoted yearning to return to an era when straight white men ran everything.
Historians can wade into the debate by explaining what “greatness” has meant in the American past and might mean again. To do so would demonstrate empathy for our fellow citizens to whom the slogan appeals, even if we disagree with Trump’s policies and dislike his egomaniacal behavior. It’s also a quintessential task of historians to make a serious attempt to grapple with the power of a key concept in the nation’s past.
I doubt Trump, for all his bluster, could offer a coherent response if anyone asked him, “So when was America great and what made it that way?” After all, the MAGA chieftain plans to spend $34 million on a National Garden of American Heroes stuffed with classical statues of what he calls “our greatest Americans to ever live.” The list includes the baseball pitcher Cy Young, Alex Trebek—the Canadian-born host of Jeopardy!—and Christopher Columbus, who never set foot on any piece of land that would become the United States three centuries later.
One might begin a serious examination of greatness by distinguishing between its meaning as material power—economic and military—and as the desire to make America a society that will live up to ideals most citizens have long said they care about: social equality, individual liberty, and a robust democracy. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln spoke of the “great” war being waged and the “great battlefield” on which he was speaking. But he ended with a call to take up “the great task remaining before us”—to make sure “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
