There’s one thing that no one can dispute about Donald Trump: He’s brilliant at creating and marketing brands.
None have been more successful than his campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again.”
It’s excited everyone from old Tea Party members to college kids tweeting #MAGA. Nonetheless, liberals have to equate “Making America Great Again” to racism, sexism, and homophobia.
In USA Today, Stephen Henderson wrote that Trump’s slogan harkened back to discrimination against minorities and asked the presumptive Republican nominee to give an actual date that he would like to return the country.
“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,” Henderson wrote.
While Henderson was tempting to fan social justice warrior flames, it’s a question worth answering.
There’s no specific date where everything was good for everyone, not even in the 1950s where, supposedly, the white patriarchy dominated the land — millions of young men were either returning from or going off to die in wars that they were drafted to fight.
Rather than looking for a date to relive in every facet, certain issues were better addressed in different times that policy makers could look to revive.
A time when welfare reform emboldened local communities, private charities, and churches to help the less fortunate before they became dependent on the state. A foreign policy that did not demand America police the world and build nations. An immigration system that didn’t reward lawbreakers and flood the labor markets that displaced American workers, and when the country took care of veterans.
What about a time when the wealth disparity wasn’t so stark that people felt like they were living in two Americas? A time when it wasn’t so easy for the politically connected to lobby for advantages, when corporations didn’t have a hand in writing legislation, and politicians resigned out of embarrassment when they disgraced the office they held.
Let’s embrace policies that help struggling Americans rather than pander to their emotions or when, say, a politically incorrect fact didn’t overtake the news cycle for days that distracts Americans from the real issues. Back to a time when it was okay to say that minorities moved out poverty before the federal government declared war on it.
When the government’s role in the lives of Americans was to protect their freedoms, not take them away.
There are also things now that we don’t need to change. We are living in the best time in the history of the world for issues like technology, health care, respect for minority groups, and the overall reduction in violence and poverty around the world.
Making America Great Again is not black and white. Neither is history, and social justice warriors who attempt to associate it with racism, sexism, or homophobia use the same fear tactics that they accuse Trump of practicing.
Anyone on the fence in this presidential election shouldn’t live in fear that Making America Great Again involves pushing certain people to the back of the bus. It means we can get on a boat that rises together.
