MAGA

[Suzie Shalmirane]

Hi.....Now that I've attracted your attention under what might be false pretenses, please hear me out.

First for the disclaimers. I'm a bleeding heart liberal who has never met a tax issue that he didn't like. I mean, all the good stuff takes money, right?

I'm a Democrat who is a bit left of moderate.

My question is this. When in American history is the time period to which MAGA refers? That shouldn't be too hard to answer or is it?

I would love to hear your comments and I promise I don't bite.

[legomaster00156]

Answers vary, and that's very much intentional. The specific time period "again" refers to is irrelevant, what matters is that it tugs on a sense of nostalgia for "the good old days". To any given individual, this might evoke the 80's with Reagan's tax cuts, the 60's with the war protests, the 50's with their racism, the 40's with World War II...

[Suzie Shalmirane]

That, my friend is a particularly astute answer. I like it a lot. I wonder if one's perception of the good old days has as much to do with phase of life they were in as the social and political milieu in which they were living.

[Skynet]

The mythical 1950s. It's not unique to Trump, but a big part of the conservative movement is hostility to what they perceive as societal change sending America down a path where it loses the values which birthed the United States into existence.

In some cases it's economic (middle-aged manufacturing workers in the Rust Belt seeing their work outsourced to the Third World) but a lot of it is more opposition to social issues on account that leftist figures such as Bernie Sanders have their own detailed economic policies for raising the quality of life (eliminate student debt, better regulations and protections for workers, quality healthcare, etc). On the contrary, a lot of Trump supporters and conservatives in general are more than eager to harm themselves economically if they fear said programs will benefit minority groups. Look at the "Welfare Queen" panic fomented by Ronald Reagan, for example.

No, a lot of it is fear from change: fear that more Americans will be darker-skinned and that the indignities thrust upon people of color will be revisited back upon them (look up the Great Replacement/White Genocide conspiracy theory), fear that the erosion of the 'traditional family' will result in out of control unplanned pregnancies and children being sexualized by LGBT people and drag queens, of Muslims taking over Europe and being accepted in public life (look at the 'this is the future liberals want' meme).

One can see these kernels represented in broader right-wing movements. The alt-right is pretty much the above but saying the quiet parts out loud, and which is now mainstream in US politics. The Putin Administration of Russia frequently posits Europe and America as a decadent fading empire who let things like equality and freedom set it adrift, whereas a masculine strongman like Putin is necessary for a good quality of life.

Make America Great Again is a rejection of the last half-century of progress our country has made. Blaming current woes of laissez-faire capitalism, costly wars in the Middle East, and the predatory insurance industries stymieing real healthcare reform on liberal college professors, secret Marxists, and 'identity politics.'

[Suzie Shalmirane]

I think that 50's are a popular target but the truth of the matter is that income tax rates topped out over 90% and unions were ascendant with membership in the mid 30% range. Both of these are an anathema to conservatives but I have a feeling that both had to do with the growing prosperity of the country.

There is the fact that once the Korean War was over, the 50's were a relatively peaceful decade, though I do remember the Marines being sent ashore in Lebanon to quell some sort of unrest or another and being greeted with flowers.

On the dark side, segregation was astride the land in most of the South and de-facto segregation was rampant in much of the country.

I just read a book entitled Dying of Whiteness that addresses people's resistance to change and their willingness to vote against their own self interest to fight that change.

I'm glad you weighed in, your perspective and sense of history never fail to amaze me.

[legomaster00156]

The 50's are indeed a popular target among the uncomfortably large segment of Trump's base that yearns for the days when the n-word was allowed to be said in public, but they are not necessarily the only target.

[Suzie Shalmirane]

I have a feeling that most of the MAGA folks have not given much thought to the era they would like to revisit. They just know that (mostly) social change is something that they don't like and if America were "great again" all of those social genies would be put back into their bottles.

[Sara Nilsson]

I always got the impression it was just "that one time we where great" which is a very twisted romanticized version of the real time. It seems no one can really say exactly what but it seems to be a distorted 50s era view, man was head of the household, woman was at home, everyone had a good time, no one was poor (well no one white and that is the only thing that matters). USA was feared on the world stage etc

Cept you know.. that never was true. But it is a comforting lie really.

[Yukina]

I always got the impression it was just "that one time we where great" which is a very twisted romanticized version of the real time. It seems no one can really say exactly what but it seems to be a distorted 50s era view, man was head of the household, woman was at home, everyone had a good time, no one was poor (well no one white and that is the only thing that matters). USA was feared on the world stage etc

Cept you know.. that never was true. But it is a comforting lie really.

Exactly. To quote Robert F. Kennedy "There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past, which in fact, never existed".

[Bezukhov]

I would recommend reading Zygmunt Bauman's Retrotopia. It tells, I believe, a great deal about the age we live in. Also, the first chapters in Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia might be an interesting read.

[ReijiTabibito]

Chiming in on this subject: generally speaking, the era that Trump is attempting to invoke heavily depends on who he's talking to within his portion of the American populace.  That's why you've never heard him solidify when he's talking about, because slogans like MAGA...okay, to explain.  The most powerful thing in existence is the human imagination.  People who are adept at exploiting people's imaginations - or conversely, at getting others to accept what's in their imagination - can wield immense power over someone's psyche, even if the thing imagined isn't in the mind of the speaker.  MAGA is like that.  You say it and let people fill in what they think it means.  It's a lot easier to get someone behind you 100% when you employ a tactic like that.  While their politics and styles are vastly different, Trump and Obama did the same act with "MAGA" and "Hope & Change."  Great Again when?  What Change?  Whatever you think it is.

For sake of keeping this merely essay-length and not doctoral dissertation, I'm breaking down into three groups: The Oldies; the Reaganites; and the New Kids on the Block (heretofore referred to as the Kids).

The Oldies are those of the Silent Generation and the Boomers that are old enough to remember the 50s.  (The Greats are practically gone at this point.)  Things were great in America in the 50s - as long as you could check off a series of boxes on a list, a list whose boxes did include immutable things like race.  They remember three things. 

One: Americans were heroes.  Of course they were; they had just saved the Old World from fascism and sanctioned genocide, and were in the process of guarding half of it from the threat of an ideology that spawned the worst regimes in modern history.  (You think Hitler was bad?  Ol' Adolf had nothing on Joe or Mao.)  Today?  It seems like everywhere they look or hear, Americans are 'those guys that screwed everything up.'  They're seen as loud and boorish and obnoxious. Their thought here is: we saved the free world from its enemies, and did so for over half a century.  Yes, we're not perfect, but nobody is.  Where is the respect we're due?

Two: things were stable.  As Billy Joel pointed out - the impetus for him writing We Didn't Start the Fire - was that while there were a number of things going on in the 'quiet' 50s (Red China, Korean War, Suez Canal Crisis, to name a few), a lot of them were in places far away that your typical American had never heard of.  It's worth pointing out that while the rate at which events happen in our world hasn't changed all that greatly, what has changed greatly is our ability to learn about them.  The Oldies grew up in a time where they weren't bombarded with the goings-on of the world every day, and that lends itself the illusion of quiet stability.  That, more than the other two, I think, is what they want back.

And three: the good times were rolling.  Housing was cheap.  Good jobs were everywhere, and you didn't need to go to college for them, and if you did, then you could work for a couple of summers and go on that instead of needing loans from the local bank or Uncle Sam.  You went to work for a company after you were done with schooling, and maybe with the exception of a mid-life crisis or big job move (like having to work for a different branch of a big multi-national company), you worked in the same company for your entire adult life, after which you were handed a pension big enough to let you retire in comfort. This was not the universal experience of all Americans at this time, but it's their lived experience, which we've told people is what matters.

Next up are the Reaganites.  They're basically any Boomers that don't remember the 50s, and the earliest portion of Generation X - basically anyone born before Watergate.

In common with the Oldies, the Reaganites remember the economic success of their time - though as young working adults rather than as children - and the immortal slogan spoken in '84: "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?"  They remember shooting up through the ranks of companies, acquired college degrees in hand, to sit in corner offices with assistants and of investment in foreign markets and new products and services and just people piling money on top of more money.  They remember a time when they were told that they were the real instruments of change and progress in America, not some government bureaucrat who draws the same salary if they help 5000 people in a year or just 5.  They want that back.

In contrast to the Oldies, who are seeking a sort of halcyonic time, when things were peaceful and quiet, the Reaganites want a time of change.  Changing things back, specifically, to the formula of the 80s, which they're convinced will lead to greater economic prosperity for all Americans.  Because it worked once before, so why shouldn't it again?  They're not against the notion that change is bad - quite the opposite, they, like their political spectrum counterparts, believe change is good - but they are in vehement disagreement about who the agents of change are and where it should come from.  They're the ones most likely in any debate over government to insist on strict constitutionalism - that the federal government has a number of pre-defined jobs, it should stick to those jobs and leave everything else to private organizations or lesser governments.  (Lesser being in scope.)

That brings us to the Kids: anyone born too late to benefit from the economic boost of the 80s directly, up to now.  (Like YT.)  While none of the Kids have ever personally benefited from economic good times - a portion of us in the mid-80s got hosed, probably for life, economically by a bunch of terrible policy decisions made in the 90s, when we were still kids - they understand that America is a country with a vibrant economy and opportunities.  Yes, it's harder than when those that came before did it, and we have to be a lot smarter about where we go and what decisions we make.  But it is still possible, contrasting with countries like China, North Korea, and Venezuela

To a certain extent, the Kids more firmly absorbed Reagan's statement that "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."  They're the one part of the pie that isn't looking backwards in nostalgia, to a time they think they remember, but looking forwards to...either a time they desperately hope is coming, or one that they desperately hope isn't.

[Suzie Shalmirane]

Wow! Thanks for that!

[Humble Scribe]

It's whenever your country last felt unambiguously good about itself. I don't know when that was for the US, but for my own country, it's WWII, and that drives a lot of the nostalgia project that is Brexit. I am guessing, but for the US probably about 1960? After that things got complicated - there was the environment, the oil crisis, Vietnam, Watergate, perhaps a rally in the 80s and 90s - Morning in America, the Soviet Union vanquished, but also lots of unsettling social trends (if you're a Christian conservative). Globalisation meant manufacturing offshored to places with cheaper labour. I think too little attention gets paid to technological changes, which are also surely destabilising. The internet has made us a more fragmented society, while also encouraging previously marginalised voices - again, if you're used to being part of the dominant majority that can be a bit of a change.

But overall, I mean, technically, I don't know if you've noticed, but America is still kind of great. If you had to say: "which is the most powerful and influential country in the world today?", there's still really only one answer. I think maybe the rise of China and renewed willingness of Russia to challenge you in certain arenas, as well as global movements like Islamic fundamentalism have maybe knocked US confidence, but you know, you don't need to talk yourselves down so much. America is still actually pretty good. It suits the right to try and cry after some lost era, but don't let that blind you to genuine achievements.