Donald Trump has trademarked the phrase “Make America great again.”
Do I have to pay him royalties for using it just now? How about if I add an exclamation point, which in truth it should have anyway? Make America great again! Take that, those who would make America less than great! And here’s another one, just because I don’t like your looks!!
Now, the phrase that the Donald owns implies that America is not currently great and needs to be made so again. But if any candidate came out and said what Trump clearly is saying — “America is not great” — he’d be pilloried at his next campaign stop with chants of “USA! USA! USA!”
So, let’s deconstruct “Make America great again.” (Geez, I hope I don’t have to pay a billionaire again for using four common words.)
First, is America not great now? Well, you certainly could make that argument, but what I have in mind for the tarnish on our greatness is probably not what Trump and his followers think about when they hear him say that. We’re a nation with the highest concentration of wealth in 80 years; where economic mobility is now lower than in Europe; where we are still in denial about our role in global climate change, the greatest human-caused slow-motion environmental disaster in history; and where we clearly have a lot of work to do on making good on our promise to treat everyone the same regardless of race or religion.
On the other hand, we still have the biggest economy in the world; we are quick and generous to help out anywhere there is a natural or human disaster; we invent all kinds of stuff to make life better and more interesting, like medical breakthroughs and micro-computers; we gave the world jazz and the First Amendment; and we have Jimmy Carter, for at least a little while longer.
I’ve never been much for American exceptionalism, and I’ve always thought the pugilistic rant that “America is the greatest country on Earth!” lacked, to say the least, subtlety. We are pretty damn special in a lot of ways and pretty pathetic in others. Maybe “America is the most complex and confounding country on Earth” would be stating it more accurately.
It seems to me that a country that has to keep telling itself how great it is lacks the quiet self-confidence that just believes that’s true. It protests too much.
Trump lives in a very simple world, where the answers are all so obvious and so obviously wrong given just a little bit of thought. Trump’s answer to immigration is a very tall wall and deportation of 11 million people — never mind that employers rely on eight million of them who are working here. Foreign policy is about having a huge military, never mind the drag that would place on our economy or that we’re fighting in places where the other side doesn’t wear uniforms or come out in the open. Never mind the lessons of the history of the “greatest nation on Earth” — we won our war for independence not by having the biggest, best-trained and best-equipped military, but by fighting a guerrilla war of attrition until the other side just couldn’t sustain the fight politically.
So, I could buy into the formulation to “make America great again” if by great we meant living up to the promise of America that everyone who works hard gets their fair share of the proceeds and that we took our place as a positive force in the community of nations, first and foremost by accepting our role in slowing global climate change.
America will be great when we no longer have this need to keep telling ourselves that we are.
