The problem with making America great again: Stephen Henderson

Let’s make America great again, shall we?

Get back to that time and place where everything was just clicking for us.

Unyielding opportunity and prosperity for everyone. Peace in our streets and abroad. American exceptionalism unquestioned around the world.

You remember. Right?

That time. The deeds that brought us to the top. That pinnacle feeling.

By all means, let’s get back there, and revel in our return.

But wait, before we go pursuing that goal, there might be a few other questions to answer.

Like, which time and space in American history are we talking about?

More important — who was the beneficiary of that American greatness, and who was left out of it?

I fear Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan, “Make America great again,” is appealing to national ego and nostalgia. And the fervor it whips up is dangerous in its whitewashing of the internal failings and conflict that have defined our union from the start.

Read in the worst way, it’s a cynical appeal to those Americans who long for a time when the inequality baked into our government and culture had a more profound effect than it does today.

What better time to pull apart Trump’s slogan, and its many facets, than the July 4th holiday, when we celebrate the opening strains and sentiments of the American experiment, launched 240 years ago.

As mantras go, it’s actually not bad. Rhetorically simple, like “change you can believe in,” Barack Obama’s 2008 slogan. Inarguable in its conceit, like “peace and prosperity,” Dwight Eisenhower's campaign theme in 1956.

But it’s also deeply complex, both in a way that I suspect Trump understands and maybe in ways his supporters don't really acknowledge.

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It supposes that there was some time in our past when things were better, when the worries and the strife and uncertainty of today weren’t present. But it’s open ended enough to embrace any number of specific references. Are you thinking about 1969, when we became the only nation to send human beings to another celestial body, the moon? Are you wistful for the days of Reaganism in the 1980s? How about the unparalleled economic growth of the 1950s? The victory against fascism in World War II?

The relative genius of Trump’s slogan is its accessibility. Anyone can draw what he or she wants from it.

But it’s also way too facile to capture the rich and difficult folds of our history, or to properly define our country’s greatest attribute: its ability to change, to adapt and to embrace expanding notions of liberty across time.

For instance, make America great again — for whom? For blacks and other people of color, and women, whose misfortunes in the land of the free have often persisted in contrast to white, male, majority success?

Name an era in the past where America’s greatness, of any stripe, wasn’t also accompanied by the misery of people in minority communities. Indeed, the very concept of America relied, at its founding, on unequal systems of human rights, social justice and economics.

So any era that followed was indelibly marked with those imbalances.

Delivering freedom to the world in the 1940s also meant denying it to blacks who fought just as hard, and as successfully, when they returned from the war, for instance.

Women were left largely out of the economic growth of the 1950s, unless they were married to men who were partaking in it.

And think of the current struggles for equality among gays or the debate over how one can even become an American.

Announcing that America can be “great again” either implicitly or explicitly embraces the notion that things were better when some folks were left out.

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That’s a pretty tough concept for a lot of people to get behind. And the most cynical among my sensibilities says Trump, and many of his followers, know that very well and intend for many people to feel left out.

Moreover, the notion of making America “great again” badly misses the point about America in the first place. The nation’s greatness isn’t tied to a specific era or date. It’s found in the words that launched the idea of America in the first place. The concept of a nation built on freedom, not just from outside tyranny but from internal restraint, is still a diamond among the rocks.

Even in the aspects of those words, and that freedom, that we’ve yet to unlock, America is great for her potential to be what the Declaration of Independence idealized back in 1776.

Even in theory, we can’t go back to find this nation’s greatness. It lies ahead, past the difficult and clashing issues we see playing out today. It lies on the other side of the profound racial moment we’re experiencing, for instance, where the undelivered promises of equality are on more brilliant display, and whose correction is championed by a loud and irrepressible movement.

It is embodied in the remarkable journey of the fight for gay rights, from spectacular marginalization just a decade and a half ago to full marriage equality today and the push toward full legal equality tomorrow.

America’s greatness is not about deeds, or circumstances, or even feelings, of old. It’s about our unending insistence that it can be better, especially for those who bore the brunt of inequality in the past, and the ideal of a nation that lives up to its greatest potential.

That’s something important to think about on July 4 — and on, into the presidential campaign unfolding around us.

Stephen Henderson is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, where this column first appeared. Follow Stephen Henderson on Twitter: @SHendersonFreep

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