"Make America Great Again" is a slogan that's been used in many variations, in many countries, before and since Donald Trump's presidential election-campaign. In this slogan hides a dangerous denial of reality, which I'll try to highlight in this post.
source: YouTube
MAGA is just one example of the many "Make My Country Great Again" slogans used around the world. China has a slight variation, as it uses "Rejuvenate" instead of "Make Great Again", but it's ultimately the same: Xi Jinping's slogan goes like "realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." This I learned from a May 2016 article from The Diplomat online magazine which calls this phenomenon "the new nationalism", but I beg to differ: nothing about this is new.
If you've read my articles about the rise of fascism in our time, you'll already know that this longing for a mythologized past is one of its many traits. Since there's no fixed definition for "fascism", it'll look different in every country, culture or time. In America it wears the mask of fundamentalist Christianity or evangelism, in Italy it's the normalization of Benito Mussolini's reign, and in China, again being the odd exception to the rule, it's a mythologized future of a "rejuvenated" country. The lack of a strict definition or form runs another risk: it causes people to not recognize it when it comes, and it causes them to dismiss any mention of the possibility of fascism rising in their country.
"Make My Country Great Again" is, when you really look at it, a form of "national nostalgia". Individually, "nostalgia is a fond longing for the past that has been shown to increase feelings of meaning, social connectedness, and self-continuity." (source) That's from a study published online on April 14, 2021, by "Frontiers in Psychology" titled Making America Great Again? National Nostalgia's Effect on Outgroup Perceptions. Please do follow the link and take a look at the publication, but here's a quote from the abstract:
Higher levels of national nostalgia predicted both positive attitudes toward President Trump and racial prejudice, though there was no evidence of such relationships with personal nostalgia. National nostalgia most strongly predicted positive attitudes toward president Trump among those high in racial prejudice.
It says, in other words, that a lot of racists, white supremacists and white nationalists are among Trump's supporters and in the MAGA movement. That's exactly the form we would expect the rise of fascism to take on in a country dominated by white men. Of course this is nothing new for anyone with even the slightest knowledge of history; how else could it look like in a country that was openly white supremacist less than a century ago, only a few decades even? What else could "national nostalgia" mean in such a country?
"Make America Great Again", or any other nationalist variation around the world, is in fact the regressive faux-populist answer to the general dissatisfaction with the status quo. Trump stole a lot of Bernie Sanders' talking points; like Bernie he promised to take care of the blue-collar workers, like Bernie he promised to expand healthcare and even boasted that his plan would cost a hell of a lot less than Obamacare - he is the best deal-maker after all... Bernie had the progressive populist answer, Trump had only progressive lies, disguised in the regressive and dangerous national nostalgia of white men who want the days when women and brown people knew their place, and transgenders, gays, lesbians were safely locked away in their closets.
Maybe you'll be surprised by what inspired me to write this short post today: it was the magnificent 2007 film "No Country for Old Men" by the Coen brothers, which I saw for the third time yesterday. The Coen brothers have made many brilliant films, like Raising Arizona, Fargo and The Big Lebowski, but "No Country for Old Men" is, in my opinion their very best. I suggest that anyone who suffers from a severe case of national nostalgia watches it. And then watch it again, and again. The film covers many themes, like what greed does to people, the harsh and cold indifference of the world, of reality, the futility of heroism and the inevitability of death. But its main theme is narrated through the arc of Tommy Lee Jones's character, who longs for a past that never really existed. The only constant in life is change, so it's futile to fear it and dumb to try to turn back the clock.
Don't watch the below linked video if you haven't seen the film yet!
No Country For Old Men Explained: The Rule of Fire
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