I want to put this one in my own words because I had it backwards for a while.
The first time I really thought about the slogan, I assumed the argument was about the again part — what year are we trying to get back to, what did “great” mean then, who was it great for. That’s the obvious question, and the post I wrote originally was mostly stuck on it. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized the slogan has a different problem before you even get to again. The problem is “America.” What does that word mean in the sentence? And the answer is: nothing specific. America is the abstraction. America is the flag, the eagle, the chord progression in a beer commercial. America is whatever the speaker needs it to be at the moment.
The people are something else. The people are messy and specific and inconvenient and the actual thing the country is made of. And “America First” — the phrase that lives next to MAGA — does not say people first. It says America first. And whoever is currently in charge gets to decide what America wants.
That’s the move I want to write about. But first, the history, because the history is uglier than I’d been told.
Where “America First” actually comes from
I learned a chunk of this from NPR and a PBS American Experience documentary called “Nazi Town, USA,” and once you know it you can’t unknow it.
In the 1930s, the United States had a real, organized, openly pro-Hitler political movement. It was called the German American Bund, founded in 1936, peak membership somewhere around 25,000 with rallies that drew far more. They ran summer camps in places like New Jersey and Wisconsin where American kids in Hitler Youth uniforms saluted swastikas. They held joint rallies with the KKK. On February 20, 1939, the Bund packed Madison Square Garden with more than 20,000 people for what they branded a “Pro-American Rally.” There’s footage. The stage was draped with a thirty-foot portrait of George Washington flanked by enormous swastikas, and speakers railed against “the Jew-controlled press” while crowds gave the Nazi salute. Outside, tens of thousands of Americans protested. Inside, the patriotic American imagery was the cover for the actual content of what was being sold.
Running alongside the Bund was the America First Committee, founded in 1940 — separate organization, much bigger, around 800,000 members, led publicly by Charles Lindbergh. The America First Committee wasn’t openly Nazi the way the Bund was, but its job was to keep the U.S. out of the war against Hitler, and Lindbergh’s 1941 speech in Des Moines explicitly blamed “the Jewish people” along with the British and the Roosevelt administration for trying to push America into the war. That speech ended his career. The Committee dissolved within days of Pearl Harbor.
The FBI under Hoover infiltrated both. An undercover reporter from the Chicago Daily Times, John Metcalfe, also went in and wrote a series that exposed the Bund’s organizational structure. William G. Sebold, a German-American who’d been recruited by Nazi intelligence, walked into the FBI, agreed to become a double agent, and his work led to the largest espionage case in American history — 33 Nazi spies arrested, with the verdicts announced hours after Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941.
I’m telling you all of that because the phrase “America First” carries that lineage. You can argue, fairly, that most of the 800,000 America First Committee members were just isolationists who didn’t want another European war and weren’t antisemites. That’s probably true. But the phrase has a history. It was the brand the most pro-Nazi movement in American political history was operating under when the FBI was raiding their summer camps. That’s not a coincidence we get to ignore.
The bigger problem: America is an abstraction
Set the history aside for a second. Even on its plain meaning, “America First” is a hollow phrase. America is the entity. America is the government, the institutions, the brand. America makes a great noun for politicians because it can be invoked without committing to anything specific. America wants this. America deserves that. America is being disrespected. America doesn’t have an opinion. Whoever is talking has the opinion, and they’re putting it in America’s mouth.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. If you say “Americans First,” everything changes. Americans is a specific noun. It’s 340 million people with names and jobs and rents and medical bills. You can’t speak for them in the abstract. You have to pick which ones. The single-mom waitress in Bakersfield is an American. The retiree on dialysis in Cleveland is an American. The kid in my son’s class whose parents came here from El Salvador in 2009 is an American. The guy who flies the Bund — sorry, the MAGA — flag at the baseball field is an American.
“Americans First” forces the speaker to specify which Americans. Which is exactly why nobody uses it as a slogan. The minute you get specific, you start having to answer for the trade-offs. Whose healthcare? Whose wages? Whose neighborhood gets the federal investment? Whose kid gets to go to college without crippling debt? “America First” lets you skip all of that. “Americans First” makes you do the work.
That’s the slogan I actually want. I don’t think it’ll ever get on a hat. It’s too long, it admits the country is people instead of a flag, and it doesn’t let you point at someone else and call them a traitor. None of those things sell merch.
And then there’s “great”
Even after you swap the noun, you’ve still got the qualifier. Great. Great when? Great by what measure? Great for which Americans?
The honest answer to “great again” is almost always the postwar period — the 1950s and 60s — when a single income could buy a house, when manufacturing wages let union workers send kids to college, when productivity gains showed up in paychecks. That’s a real thing. It happened. Between roughly 1948 and the early 1970s, productivity and worker compensation rose together. Then they diverged, and they’ve stayed diverged for fifty years. Most workers’ wages have barely kept up with inflation since then; the gains have gone almost entirely to the top of the income distribution. That’s the gut-level frustration MAGA is actually channeling, and it’s a legitimate frustration.
But the postwar economy was the way it was because most of the rest of the industrial world had been bombed into rubble and the United States rebuilt it on credit. The Marshall Plan didn’t just rebuild Europe out of generosity — it rebuilt markets that bought American exports. Bretton Woods set up the financial system that put the dollar at the center of global trade. American manufacturing dominance was a temporary structural condition, not a policy choice we can re-enact by raising tariffs and pulling back from alliances. The postwar prosperity was built by engaging with the world. The version of “America First” being sold now is the opposite of that.
And the part that nobody who chants the slogan wants to admit: the 1950s were “great” for some Americans and brutal for others. Black families could not get federally backed mortgages in most neighborhoods. Women got fired when they got pregnant. LGBTQ Americans were criminalized. If the great-again target is the lived experience of the white guy on the assembly line in 1957, then it’s specifically not great for everyone else, and saying so out loud at least lets us argue honestly about whether that’s the country we want.
Where I land
Make America Great Again is a Rorschach test. People hear what they already believe and feel validated because nothing in the slogan commits to anything. Make Americans’ Lives Better is a different sentence. It picks a side — the side of the people, not the abstraction — and it forces the speaker to say which Americans and how. That’s the slogan I’d vote for. That’s the country I’d actually want to live in.
The original phrase has a 1930s lineage I’d rather not be carrying around, and it answers the wrong question. Put people first. Specify which ones. Define what better means. Show your work.
That would actually be novel.
That’s the whole post.
Even that's Odd 
Leave a comment