When then-presidential candidate
Donald Trump seized upon the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” he
could not have more shrewdly marked the battle line where the election and the
next four years of his term would be fought. Resonating with Ronald Reagan’s
1980 campaign slogan “Let's make
America great again,” “MAGA” was perfectly calculated to galvanize Americans
on the right who were fed up with eight years of predecessor Barack Obama
apologizing for our country, denying American exceptionalism, alienating our
allies, and empowering our enemies. It also was the perfect phrase with which to
expose the seething hatred leftists feel for this country and its supporters. Trump
won the election, no matter what the sore losers of both left and right insist,
and two and a half years after he was swept into the White House by heartland patriots
(which is exactly why the coastal elites want to eliminate the electoral
college), his slogan continues to trigger the rage and animosity of
America-haters.
For example: last week in an interview with
MSNBC, a question about American greatness prompted a rant from Obama-era
attorney general Eric Holder. "I hear these things about 'Let’s make
America great again' and I think to myself, ‘Exactly when did you think America
was great’?” he said on the network. “It
certainly wasn’t when people were enslaved. It certainly wasn’t when women
didn’t have the right to vote. It certainly wasn’t when the LGBT community was
denied the rights to which it was entitled…
“You know, America has done superb things,”
Holder continued. “It has done great things. And it has been a leader in you
know, a whole range of things. But we are always a work in process and… looking
back, ‘Make America Great Again’ is inconsistent with who we are as Americans
at our best where we look at the uncertain future, embrace it and make it our
own.”
The rant was a direct shot at Trump, his MAGA
slogan, and American citizens who believe in this country’s exceptionalism. It
highlighted the fundamental divide between the leftists who are determined to
override human nature in pursuit of their utopian vision of human
perfectibility, and conservatives who understand that people are fallen beings who
can be both flawed and great. For the left, on the other hand, Americans
cannot be great because we aren’t yet perfect; not only that, we aren’t merely
imperfect but evil because we came by our unparalleled power and prosperity
through the exploitation and oppression of others. Thus, we will never be truly
great until we atone for those sins by diminishing our greatness.
We’re not going to
make America great again. It was never that great. We have not reached
greatness, we will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged, we
will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women, 51
percent of our population, is gone and every woman’s full potential is realized
and unleashed and every woman is making her full contribution.
Cuomo’s office, in damage control mode, later clarified
that the governor “believes America is great,” which directly contradicts what
he actually said, and that he believes America simply “has not yet reached its
maximum potential” of “full equality.” Of course, the sort of equality Cuomo
and his fellow socialists mean is not equality before the law or equality of
opportunity, but the false equality of results, which they intend to achieve
through government enforcement. That is not American greatness; that is
totalitarianism.
To undermine the
inspirational power of the slogan’s explicit call to greatness, the left has
fallen back on its go-to strategy of tarring America First patriots as
white supremacists. This week, for instance, corrupt liar Hillary Clinton
shared on social media a
HuffPo article claiming that “MAGA” has become a symbol of the far right. “The
white nationalists certainly believe ‘MAGA’ is a white nationalist slogan,”
tweeted globalist Hillary, using “white nationalist” twice in one sentence so that
even the thickest of brain-dead Democrats can’t miss the association between MAGA
and racism.
In another
example, the hat and slogan featured prominently in Jussie Smollett’s recent botched
attempt to boost his career (and accelerate a race war in America) with the
ludicrous claim that two white rednecks happened to be wandering the streets of
sub-zero-temperature Chicago at 2 a.m. with a noose and a bottle of bleach,
recognized the little-known black actor exiting a sandwich shop, attacked him,
and shouted, “This is MAGA country” before Smollett courageously fought them
off with a Subway sandwich. When the two black
siblings involved in the hoax purchased items to use in the attack, they
reportedly asked specifically for a MAGA hat, but the clothing store didn’t
sell the item.
Once upon a time
the notion that America was great would have been considered self-evident to all
but card-carrying Communists. But the Democrat party has become so radicalized
in recent decades that Trump’s slogan and hat have spurred hate-filled radicals
around the country to launch profane verbal assaults and physical violence
against men, women, and children almost too many times to count. What is it
about MAGA that scorches leftists like holy water on demons? What is so
triggering about a slogan every
American should be able to get behind?
Two things. First,
as the examples of Holder and Cuomo above demonstrate, the notion that there
was ever a time when America was
great enrages and unhinges the left because they have been indoctrinated to despise
this country and its history. They reject the concept of American
exceptionalism. They no longer see the Founding Fathers as the architects of
the freest country in history but merely as sexist slaveowners.
Second, the left
assumes that making America great again means turning back the clock to some
Edenic rightwing fantasy of 1950s-era segregation and pre-feminism, when women
and minorities knew their places and the white patriarchy ruled unchallenged. “It takes us back
to what I think, an American past that never in fact really existed, this
notion of greatness,” Holder had said. This misconception enables
leftists to scorn and marginalize the whole idea as nothing more than bigoted
nostalgia.
The truth is that
making America great again means turning back the clock to before the advent of
Barack Obama, the divisive, anti-colonialist radical who was hell-bent on fundamentally
transforming the United States from its leading role as the preeminent
superpower into merely another ensemble player on the world stage. It means reviving
a patriotic spirit of pride in our nation’s essential goodness, its unequalled generosity,
its international leadership in promoting freedom and prosperity. It means reuniting
Americans of all colors and creeds in a national vision that embraces rather
than denies our exceptional role in history – and that is why “Make America
Great Again” is the quintessential political slogan for our time.
From FrontPage Mag, 4/10/19
