We Do Need to Make America Great Again, But Here’s How
By: Michael Hines
Tags: Make America Great Again, Democratic Party, America, Middle Class, Election 2020

With the Trump Presidency almost certainly soon coming to an end, those of us on the political left can now not only breathe a little easier, but also restore a certain level of nuance that has been missing from the hysteria-induced conversation brought on by President Trump’s bombastic leadership and his enablers and sycophants across the Republican party for the past four years.

Where such nuance is sometimes missing is in discussions about the underlying meaning of “Make America Great Again” and the implications of its widespread appeal. For quite some time on the left and far left, the conversation has gone basically like this: “America was never great. It only felt great if you were white, and possibly also male. The people who want to ‘Make America Great Again’ either want to reestablish past norms of male dominance over society or restore white supremacy to the way it operated in previous decades.”

This narrative is significantly incomplete though. Yes, of course there is a disturbingly large throng of people who either want men to have more dominance again and see a return to traditional gender roles, or who want the country to be decidedly white (and probably also Christian and probably also straight) to the disenfranchisement of our country’s minorities. However, that narrative overly simplifies and essentializes the appeal of Make America Great Again — and if we on the left don’t get the full diagnosis of its appeal correctly, we are liable not only to alienate potential future Democratic voters (for whom white supremacy and patriarchy are not essential to their vision of America) but also fail to maintain turnout in upcoming elections cycles among existing recent Democratic voters, many of whom are exhausted and disenchanted despite the recent Biden victory.

There are indeed some legitimate and morally applaudable categories of ways in which America was once “great” that are largely absent from American life today. This appeal to particular categories of past American greatness remains valid even when one recognizes and accepts that life today is in many ways better for a broad array of marginalized peoples who were more and more marginalized the further back into the past you chose to examine.

First, in certain ways, America in the mid-twentieth century achieved certain benchmarks of what I will call National Greatness. We regularly racked up major accomplishments as a country. The enormous range of such achievements is belied by the overly simplistic t-shirts and bumper stickers one sometimes sees that refer to America as “undefeated two time world war champs”: For many decades, we experienced not only rapid economic growth but that growth broadly accrued up and down the socioeconomic ladder in such a manner that inequality actually decreased for decades. Stakeholder capitalism, not shareholder capitalism, was all the rage. Meanwhile, we built a world class system of interstate infrastructure, expanded a massive system of state-run higher education institutions, eradicated several infectious diseases, put human beings on the moon, achieved a modicum of improvement to civil and women’s rights after decades of fighting over those issues, and in various ways maintained a position as the undisputed leader of the so-called “free world,” or “First World.” That supremacy was epitomized when the leader of the so-called “Second World”, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, begged to visit Disneyland and its literal Fantasyland, while touring our metaphorical fantasyland of a country, and our political leaders taunted him by refusing to permit it.

People of a certain age, many in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, lived through a time when America routinely scored “greatness” in its national endeavors in spite of, or perhaps because of, the relative proximity and memories of world wars and Great Depression, as well as the ongoing existential threat of nuclear annihilation and a global battle to demonstrate decidedly that capitalism was better than communism.

In other ways, America of the mid-twentieth century also regularly enabled certain benchmarks of Individual Greatness experienced by workers and their families, particularly if you were white, although not exclusively. In the mid-20th century, 40 percent of the labor force was unionized, and labor’s share of national income was about 65 percent compared to about 55 percent today. A typical single worker’s wages could pay for a home, a car, low cost community college education, and healthcare, in just 40 weeks of work, with the remaining weeks of a year’s pay enabling other forms of discretionary spending or savings. Real hourly wages for the average worker climbed steadily until 1973. Healthcare spending cost our society just eight percent of GDP, not the 18 percent of today.

Over time though things changed. Workers who had been relatively shielded by their employers from many of the vicissitudes of the business cycle and global markets were eventually told “now you’re on your own.” Meanwhile, a series of poor public policy choices saw the prices of housing, education, and healthcare explode in recent decades far faster than general inflation. Today, it takes MORE than 52 weeks of an average single wage to pay for that basket of middle-class goods that took just 40 weeks of one earner’s pay in the past. Many single-income households fail to maintain a middle-class life today, and for many dual-income households, the exploding cost of child care eats away at the family’s supplemental earnings. These changes may explain in part why young adult Americans today marry later, have children later, and have driven the birthrate down to a 100 year low for several consecutive years.

For many people of a certain age, mainly in their 30s, 40s and 50s, it was normal to grow up in families in which parents or grandparents without a higher education were routinely able to achieve a middle-class lifestyle and could rely on steady work and security in retirement. Their parents and grandparents had the expectation of careers-for-life at a single company, and an array of other supports including defined-benefit retirement plans and no-deductible health insurance. Yet these same 30, 40 and 50-somethings today, particularly those without a college education, can’t rely on those old work norms, outside perhaps government employment or the measly 10 percent of jobs which are still unionized. Today’s 20-somethings at least arrive in the workforce with no delusions of expecting such benefits or job security to begin with, let alone affordable starter houses or cost-efficient higher education that were more widespread in the past.

If the Democratic party wants to win elections regularly, particularly with geographical and constitutional biases built against its relatively populist platform, it has to recognize that both these categories of National Greatness and Individual Greatness that were more accessible in the mid-twentieth century are part of the appeal of the call to “Make America Great Again.” This is a primary motivation for many voters, compared to a desire to send gays back into the closet, get women back in the kitchen, or keep black and brown Americans from not “knowing their place”.

The Democratic party needs to achieve rapid successes in helping ordinary working families get higher wages, in offering forms of insurance that minimize downsize risk, and in lowering the costs of various hallmarks of middle-class life such as housing, education, healthcare, and transportation. Meanwhile, it might be nice if we had some large -scale national projects to rally around as a people that could be sources of national, bipartisan, civic pride, after what feels like two decades of “losses” that began with 9/11 and proceeded into a trio of recessions, numerous government shutdowns and manufactured debt-ceiling crises, pandemic and global embarrassments.

To be clear, America was not actually some utopian fantasyland of civic and moral perfection in the twentieth century — and the era’s list of serious detractions is lengthy, whether one looks at segregation or McCarthyism, the Drug War or the Vietnam War. The promise of true equality and a great society remains in an unrealized future. But our past did feature an easier road for even unskilled workers, and the country as a whole regularly accomplished world class achievements later copied overseas, while such achievements are lacking today. The left should recognize that these are major motivations behind the hunger to “Make America Great Again.” They are, in fact, the kinds of qualities and achievements the Democratic party ought to be more suited to actually restoring, what with their party’s belief in actual governance and systemic policy program ideas. We need to rack up such “wins” again for the American people.

If we don’t, this screwball version of America will keep on keeping on for the foreseeable future, Trump or no Trump.