The White Imagination of Make America Great Again
How the collective memory of whiteness defines Donald Trump’s presidential slogan and is breaking our democracy
Make America Great Again is the product of white imagination. When Donald Trump descended the gold escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, he opened his campaign for president by speaking to white anxiety about multicultural America. Here’s what he said:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
The white folks in the audience knew what the two “they’re not sending you(s)” meant. With this language of racial exclusion, Donald Trump’s announcement that he would be running for president drew some rehtorical (and civic) boundaries. By speaking these words, Trump created a white in-group and separated the members of that group from all others.
As Lindsay Hubar has made clear, “these racist nativist discourses also have a function to maintain a system of subordination.” A system Donald Trump claimed he and he alone could save — which is why he closed with this:
Sadly, the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.
The racial subtext of what Trump was saying hinged on his inclusion of we. The former president spent his entire speech making the case that it was the white-in group who could save the country from the multicultural out-group that had killed the American dream.
Accordingly, the Trumpist vision to Make America Great Again is an authoring of fiction. To make Make America Great Again work, Donald Trump had to harken back to a mythical golden past. And, in doing so, he conjured up a bygone era imagined from the collective memory of whiteness.
Collective Memory of Whiteness
According to sociologists Geneviève Zubrzycki and Anna Woźny of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, collective memory is essential to the creation, legitimization, and maintenance of national identities. But what people choose to remember is only one side of the coin. As Zubrzycki and Woźny point out:
If shared memory is essential to national identity, so is collective amnesia… the creation of national identity through the articulation of a master narrative of the nation came at a price, however, as it implied the forgetting of alternative memories, identities, and loyalties.
In other words, national identity is built on a kind of selective memory. It’s built on remembering as well as forgetting — or on what historian Edward Cashin called history as believed.
This history as believed is how the Civil War is mythologized among portions of the white South. Instead of remembering the conflict as a battle over the continuation of slavery, many white Southerners view the Civil War as a lost cause: a conflict where Southern states were simply trying to protect themselves from an overzealous and unconstitutional federal government. It’s this selective memory that transformed the Civil War from a war about what it means to be human to a settling of legal questions — from human rights to legal boundaries. So, the politics of collective memory, and the history as believed that goes along with it, requires remembering. But remembering in ways that warrant convenient forgetting.
The former president’s Make America Great Again trope depended on this combination of remembering and forgetting. The belief that there is some golden past where America was great to which we can (and should) return only works if we forget about all the folks who were (and still are) marginalized by that past. To uphold the 1950s as the American ideal is to ignore the white supremacy and anti-blackness that predominated the era.
When the Supreme Court overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, most Southern states embarked on a decade long strategy of massive resistance to avoid complying with the court’s directive that they integrate their schools. To accomplish this goal, Southern segregationists used fear-based rhetoric to drive support for segregated society. For example, here’s an ad from the Alabama chapter of the National State’s Rights Party:
As you can see, 1950s white supremacy didn’t have to dress itself in nice words like Make America Great Again. It could walk around in public completely unclothed.
The National State’s Rights Party used explicitly racist language to play on white anxiety about what the future might look like should Southern states be forced to integrate their schools. In this case, Southern segregationists used history as believed to create a mythical golden past rooted in the white aristocracy of the antebellum South. And, then, they connected this collective memory to their 1950s present by shouting that their vision of a white future was being buried by the changing world around them. In other words, after the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, the white political class embarked on a fear-based propaganda campaign to make America great again.
Making America (Un)Great
Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again uses this same collective memory of whiteness. It marries a mythical past with the lived experience of the present to cast warning about a dismal and dire future. When Donald Trump preached Make America Great Again, he was calling the 1950s into existence in the same way Southern segregationists of the 1950s were calling upon the antebellum South.
Make America Great Again is the product of collective memory’s history as believed. But it is also more than that. As Zubrzycki and Woźny warn in their article, the politics of collective memory can act as justification for breaking democracy:
Collective memory, especially as it pertains to unresolved difficult pasts and sentiments of collective trauma and guilt, can help frame elected elites, immigrants, and various others as morally corrupt enemies of the nation and justify breaching democratic rules in response to them.
So, the politics of collective memory gave Donald Trump permission to break our democracy’s rules. And it’s what gave the insurrectionists permission to storm the United States Capitol on January 6. And it’s what continues to give permission to those who believe Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen by black and brown voters in the country’s urban centers.
Donald Trump set out to Make America Great Again. What he proved, though, is that the antidemocratic nature of white supremacy will continue to subject and oppress those who live outside the collective memory of whiteness. Thus, Make America Great Again really means: great for some; (un)great for all others.
