Opinion/Harold: Make America Great Again: Just when was that great period?
The upcoming midterm elections promise, inexplicably, to be very close. Inexplicably, because if polls on key issues such as reproductive rights, health care, climate change, and gun restrictions are even remotely accurate, we will be decisively voting the GOP rascals out of power. But according to the same polling outfits, we won't be.
Sensible, predictable voting on important issues won't determine the outcome. Lies and crazy notions will. That the last election was stolen, even though there is absolutely no evidence to support that idea. The Orwellian “doublethink” that Jan. 6th insurrectionists were the truest of patriots. That Trump, despite all the compelling evidence that he deserves to be in jail for any number of crimes, is the greatest politician since sliced bread and an all-around wonderful fellow. That we should MAGA: Make America Great Again.
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion and MAGA has been a powerful weapon for Trump and his forces. Of course, it doesn't hold up under more than two seconds' scrutiny. But it's remarkable just how little scrutiny there has been. In fact, I can't remember hearing a single pol wearing one of those perky red caps being confronted with the obvious question: Just when was that great America you'd like us to return to?
Was it that great period energized for many by the pursuit of our Manifest Destiny of European development of this continent coast to coast? But nostalgia for that heady, expansionist period of our history runs smack into the era's basic business plan of near genocide of the native Americans and enslaving millions of Africans to do much of the work.
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Was it the late 19th century period of industrialization and other progress of a sort until the Roaring Twenties ran headlong into the Great Depression? But no: to claim that America as the great one would mean forgetting about the downside of unregulated exploitation of workers by rich men we call “robber barons,” the Jim Crow legacy of lynchings, the heyday of the KKK.
Was it the period of the so-called Greatest Generation of Tom Brokaw's book of that name? Only if you leave out the part of the story told in the recent PBS series, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. Too many of that generation were anti-semites with an embarrassing affection for Hitler.
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The 1950s then. That must be what the MAGA folks have in mind. The Depression behind us and victorious in a terrible war, a decade of relative prosperity for some, a rising tide. But surely Trump would not return us to the ongoing segregation and lynchings, the pre-women's movement version of domestic life, back-alley abortions, and unequal rights for women. Would he?
True, that was also a period of labor flexing its rights. And the courageous start to the civil rights movement. But that's probably not the sort of greatness Trump and his supporters are thinking about.
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I admit to waxing a bit nostalgic myself for the '90s era when many of us could enjoy the silly genius of “Seinfeld,” a program about “nothing,” a white, middle-class joke on itself unimaginable after 911, let alone 2008 or 2016.
One looks back fondly to those good old days when we impeached presidents for Oval Office hanky-panky rather than for attempting to wreck democracy. But it's doubtful that's what Trumpists have in mind when hearkening back to greatness.
Probably what MAGA comes down to is more a psychological than historical phenomenon: that great era before the burden of being “woke” about such stuff as institutional racism, the vulnerability of our democratic institutions to a power-hungry real estate mogul. The days before being pestered endlessly about climate change, about that contradiction of a minority rule democracy.
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Actually, precisely because of the majority's insistence on wokeness, this year of 2022, as counter-intuitive as it seems, is arguably the closest we have come to genuine greatness. The popularity of dangerously crazy ideas threatens to continue our country's plunge to Hungary- or Russia-style “illiberal democracy.” But never have so many faced more soberly and maturely so many problematic aspects of American society and institutions with such heartfulness and inclusivity.
Dickens' famous passage about another fraught time captures this knife-edge moment: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. ...”
Brent Harold, a Cape Cod Times columnist and former English professor, lives in Wellfleet. Email him at kinnacum@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: MAGA exploits powerful emotion of nostalgia despite being built on lies
