When Was the Phrase Make America Great Again Introduced

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Did you ever wonder why Donald Trump's "Brand America Not bad Once again" slogan took such root amidst the Republican base? Did it symbolize a return to an age when wages were college and jobs more secure? Or was information technology coded racial language designed to signal a rollback to a fourth dimension when people of color (and women) knew their place? In the soul-searching and recrimination among Democrats afterward Hillary Clinton'southward defeat, both theories have their champions.

Simply a closer await at bourgeois rhetoric in recent years reveals that "Make America Great Again" was not Trump's invention. It evolved from a phrase that became central to the Republican establishment during the Obama years: "American exceptionalism." People often equate the expression with the notion that God made America "a city upon a hill," in the words of the Puritan colonist John Winthrop. Nonetheless, as Academy of California-Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel noted in a 2011 commodity, this usage but came into vogue after Barack Obama became president. Previously information technology was mainly used by academics to mean that America is an exception compared with other Western democracies, for better or worse, as illustrated past its top-notch universities or its bare-bones gun control.

Prior to 2008, "American exceptionalism" appeared in news articles a handful of times a twelvemonth, but after Obama was elected the references skyrocketed, largely because of a drumbeat from Republicans. Once the tea party wave made John Boehner speaker of the House in 2010, for case, he summarized the growing consensus amidst Republicans: Obama had turned his back on the Founding Fathers to the point where he "refused to talk almost American exceptionalism." (In fact, in 2009 the president had stated, "I believe in American exceptionalism.") The phrase's popularity in GOP talking points—often in attacks on Obama'south "socialist" policies—paralleled the spread of conspiracy theories about his citizenship and supposed jihadi sympathies.

Defending "American exceptionalism" was a theme of Hand Romney'south 2012 campaign; he blasted Obama for supposedly thinking that "America'southward just some other nation" destined to become "a European-manner entitlement gild." Romney'south campaign co-chair John Sununu added that Obama should "acquire how to be an American." (He later apologized.)

The 2016 Republican presidential candidates and their surrogates sang the same tune. When Fox News pundit Sean Hannity asked Jeb Bush for his thoughts on exceptionalism, Bush replied, "I practice believe in American exceptionalism," dissimilar Obama, who "is disrespecting our history and the extraordinary nature of our country." Rudy Giuliani was more explicit. "I do not believe that the president loves America," he asserted, suggesting Obama did not think "we're the almost exceptional country in the world." During a speech a month later in Selma, Alabama, the president pointed out that the ongoing fight for ceremonious rights is a cornerstone of what makes America exceptional.

To get more of a quantitative sense of the phrase's development, I analyzed the Republican Party platform. All political party platforms typically emphasize faith in American greatness, only between 1856 and 2008, the GOP never used the expression "American exceptionalism" or even the adjective "exceptional" to describe the land. By dissimilarity, the final section of the 2012 Republican platform lambasting the Obama presidency was titled "American exceptionalism." The 2016 platform put the phrase into the first line of its preamble: "Nosotros believe in American exceptionalism." The evolution of "American exceptionalism" into an anti-Obama rallying cry with nativist overtones evoked earlier appeals to "states' rights" to rouse whites resenting the end of segregation.

In his book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, Trump, too, framed his calendar as a defence force of "American exceptionalism." "Maybe my biggest beef with Obama is his view that at that place's nil special or infrequent about America—that we're no dissimilar than any other country." Trump later adopted a catchier slogan, "Brand America Great Again," simply it retained the nativist overtones and racial domestic dog whistles of the start. Paired with Trump's open up conspiracy-mongering almost Obama'due south forged birth certificate and supposed Muslim religion, it amplified and dramatized the Republican establishment'southward slyer assertions near Obama'due south un-American values.

Trump would eventually abandon dog whistles in favor of blunter race-baiting. What remains to be seen is whether he and the Republican establishment will continue flashing the "exceptionalism" signal in the mail-Obama years—to pigment new opponents equally un-American—or whether that language was uniquely deployed to delegitimize the nation's first black president. At the very least, it provided fertile ground for Trumpism.

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Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/american-exceptionalism-maga-trump-obama/

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