Make America Great Again
Make American Great Again has never been a set of policies designed to bring about needed or desired change in people’s lives. The change MAGA refers to is not change in institutions and policies but in an idea: “America.” More specifically, the goal is not to change America into something different from what it is but to change how people feel about America as it is.
What is important about the idea of America as that exists in the mental landscape of those under the influence of MAGA is the judgment of it as good or bad. In other words, what must be retrieved in the America we hold in our minds is our good feeling about it. But Make America Great Again also, and more importantly, means make our connection to America one that makes us feel good about ourselves.
To understand what this means, we need to start, I think, with the matter of loss. After all, the goal is not simply to make America great, but to make it great again. The loss implied in the language is then attributed to the actions of others (mainly Democrats) whose rejection of the goodness of America is the reason it is no longer great. Those responsible for this loss must either be brought around to the right way of thinking about it or gotten rid of.
In other words, we need to consider how the relationship of the MAGA crowd with Democrats is a way of disavowing their own responsibility for the lost goodness of the once good object.
This might seem straightforward enough as an account of the phenomenon; but it is not. Missing in it is the use of Democrats as containers for projection of a dynamic internal to the MAGA crowd. In other words, we need to consider how the relationship of the MAGA crowd with Democrats is a way of disavowing their own responsibility for the lost goodness of the once good object. Doing so will allow us to consider the possibility that it is not the badness others have attached to America that has undermined the goodness of those identified with it, but the badness of those who identify with America that has made America bad. Then, the entire MAGA phenomenon is a way for those involved with it to manage their ambivalence about themselves.
If we consider this possibility, we can begin to understand why policies meant to use government to improve the lives of those who would make America great again are rejected by the MAGA movement. Here, I am thinking specifically of measures that use government to assure a minimum level of wellbeing for all citizens. Policy intended to achieve this goal is rejected because, for members of the MAGA movement, measures designed to make welfare secure simply affirm that those who might benefit from them need those measures and are therefore impaired in their capacity to take care of themselves. They have failed in making the transition to adulthood and gaining the respect associated with the independence and self-reliance associated with it. Indeed, knowing that they, in fact, need the help of government is one way to know that they are not great, if they ever were. And this means that the greatest threat to the goodness of “America” is their association with it.
But thinking that way leaves out of account what may be the most important thing about vaccine resistance, which is that it expresses the conviction that the virus is a test of virtue, especially the virtue of courage.
A good case in point is the MAGA response to the Covid-19 vaccine. This response has typically been considered a straightforward expression of a political strategy, and that is no doubt an important factor. But thinking that way leaves out of account what may be the most important thing about vaccine resistance, which is that it expresses the conviction that the virus is a test of virtue, especially the virtue of courage. Those who seek to avoid the test by getting vaccinated fail the test; those who take the test and die will meet their final judgment. Those who take the test and survive gain the reward for their virtue: they are made great again. And, when they are made great again so is the nation with which they are identified.
But what have they really gained by taking the test and surviving? How good is it to be “great?” The answer is not very good if this is not the only test. What if there are more tests to come? What if life is just one endless series of tests of courage, virtue, and the capacity for suffering? If it is, then winning simply allows you to move on to the next test, which is to say to continue to suffer. This means that your badness persists to the end and all you really have left is self-hatred reworked into envy of and hatred for those who refuse the test, those who allow government to prevent, or at least delay, their death and ease their suffering while they live. You hate those who would be vaccinated because they are able to accept the good that life offers however limited that might be.
It might be said that the MAGA crowd is the agent that brings about the crisis that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party sees as the necessary stimulus to the waking of the nation to the need for progressive change. If so, the MAGA crowd is happy to play that role because it lines up with their own end: the destruction of hope that life can be anything more than “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”