I mean… It’s not great. But the reasons the MAGA people think it’s not great and the actual reason it isn’t great are mutually exclusive.

You are literally nine or ten years late.

…yeah? And both campaigns have taken place after those dirty commie dems were in charge.

(Paraphrasing an old comment from the Bad Site)

“Make America Great” would be a fine, if bland slogan. Everybody wants that. It’s not controversial, but also not distinctive in any way.

“Make America Greater than Ever” would be better. The implication being that we can do better, and be better. But they intentionally went with something else.

It seems to me, and as you have identified, that the “Again” is the key part of the phrase that drives the whole narrative. Here’s the kicker: by nearly every objective measure, the country is safer, richer, more equal, and has a better overall quality of life today than at any point in history[1]. The only thing that has significantly declined over the last 40-50 years is “the percentage of total societal influence held by straight white men.”

“Again” is the dog-whistle of misogyny, racism, and homophobia, wrapped up in the plausible deniability of nostalgia for an objectively worse time.

[1] There may be some room for disagreements here, primarily because of the first Trump administration and the pandemic years causing some backsliding, but this was especially true in 2016 when the slogan first really appeared, which is when it should be judged.

It’s a dog whistle for “Make slavery legal again” and “Woman into the kitchen”

It also means that it once was great but it also completely abdicates any responsibility for defining when that great period was in our timeline?

Was it great in the 50s when institutional racism was the law and a black girl going to college was justification for rolling out the national guard?

Was it great in the 70s when we were fighting in Vietnam for literally no reason?

Like what time period are they talking about?

Maybe they mean in the late 40s when we were rolling off the high of winning world war II? And the great majority of men had died to the point where wage inflation made even moderately capable men comparatively wealthy to today’s standard?

Is make America great again really just a code to try to start and win world war III so that 20% of all males in America would die and therefore the surviving 80% would have more luxuries given to them by default?

Yeah, but it’s not the gotcha you think it is. The entire right-winger thing is whinging about everything being someone’s fault. Particularly de gubmit. Even in cases when they are in a majority in said “gubmit” at the time, and have been for nigh on a decade.

Point is, you are implicitly giving these cretins too much credit in the rhetoric they use. It’s not meant to make sense. It’s meant to rile up rednecks/whatever-other-relevant-stereotype.

You have to understand that they are not intellectually honest. They have no issues knowingly dwelling in a false narrative. The false narrative serves to normalize their movement and recruit people as they publicly repeat it unchallenged amongst each other.

I thought MAGA was coined when he was demonizing immigrants and campaigning on building a wall and making Mexico pay for it.

It was a racists dog whistle from the very beginning. It meant expelling the Jews Mexicans to make America White again. After 8 years of a Black president.

Did people really miss this? This was like… the main focus of his campaign.

There was never anything “great” about the US - unless you believe that the world’s largest experiment in white supremacism is (somehow) “great.”

This one is easy to explain away… If you’re ranking countries on greatness, then you put America at the top. But then unfortunate things happen, like minority presidents and gay marriage and solar panels, so that makes America not quite as great, but still far better than everyone else. But if we could roll back the clock, maybe to some time before women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, that would make America return to the extra high standard that it’s capable of achieving.

Yes

Yes, actually. Hell, lemmy will tell you that rent is sky high, wages are too low, theres not enough workers rights, just everything is fucked.

The MAGA solution is just different than the left wing solution.

I think MAGA is an unspoken admission that there are a lot of easily swayed people in this country that have been failed by the existing system.

Even if deep down they know it is all BS they can’t allow themselves to acknowledge it because that would mean having to face the reality that they don’t have much of a future to look forward to for various reasons.

A lot of people can’t take that mentally and keep going day to day, so they just go along with the crazy because it seems easier to go with the delusion.

The way I’ve always interpreted it is far more abstract, and probably far more kind, than most people.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that there’s some fucked up shit happening not only in the world, but in the USA. Most people realize and accept this to differing degrees. Most people will disagree on the specifics of what, even if they might have significant overlap with others.

One thing also almost universally believed is that “things didn’t suck so much when I was younger”. The reality is that it’s a combination of nostalgia, the fact that you were less aware of everything when you were younger, and you had less to worry about when you were younger. But most people can’t shake the feeling that things were better when (insert something from earlier in their life).

To me, MAGA preys on that nostalgia for simpler times. It doesn’t define what was so great before, when it was so great, or what specifically has changed. Only that something has changed to diminish the greatness, and we have to change it back.

People may not like me saying this, but it has a lot of parallels to Obama’s campaign slogan, change. It doesn’t define what’s wrong, it doesn’t define what needs to change, but again it taps into that generally shared concept that things would just be better if something changed. People fill in the blanks themselves with whatever allows them to connect with the concept. The main difference is that “change” as a slogan is not tied to the concept of “going back” to make things better, leaving conceptual room for forward movement.

Ultimately the individual gives both sayings meaning and emotional content themselves, even if they may not be able to explicitly parse it back out to specifics.