MAGA Without Greatness

From National Greatness to Make America Great Again

In the four- to eight-year electoral dialectic of American politics, I have begun to think of MAGA and Trumpism as a delayed reaction to the conservatism of the Bush Era as much as it is a reaction to the person and policies of Barack Obama. We see it in the big differences, such as the volte-face from interventionism to America First. And in the little things, like, where is Bill Kristol politically these days?

The thought and rhetoric of the American right is rarely static. It shifts and winds with its political needs and priorities. Themes and motifs recur and change. It’s rarely homogenous, and usually when one cluster of ideas is dominant there are at least some on the right holding to an older position or perhaps a higher truth. At perhaps the height of the George W. Bush presidency, in the lead-up to the Invasion of Iraq, paleoconservative warhorses led by Pat Buchanan founded The American Conservative. Their little magazine challenged neoliberal trade and border policies, neocon foreign policy, and deeply criticized Israel (especially its hardline Prime Minister Ariel Sharon). It’s hard not to think versions – sometimes fairly warped versions – of this counter current have triumphed on the right. At least temporarily.

One interesting place we can see this dynamic is in the concept of greatness, specifically national greatness. It’s been lost, I think, that before Make America Great Again, American greatness was the purview of neoconservatives. In particular, a short manifesto “A Return to National Greatness” written by David Brooks for the Weekly Standard in early 1997.

The 1990s were pivotal and transformative for the American right. They were, at first, victims of their own success. Between twelve years of Reagan-Bush and the collapse of the Soviet Union, conservatives felt that their ideas had triumphed. All ideological competitors to Western liberal democracy – and its conservative interpretation at that – had been exhausted. Yet, all was not well. George H. W. Bush, never a true-blue conservative, governed as the last traditional Republican. Movement conservatives abandoned him for the fire-breathing Buchanan. Meanwhile, the liberal left adapted themselves to the new era. In the United States, the New Democrat Bill Clinton defeated the wounded Bush. In the UK, the New Labour Tony Blair ousted the post-Thatcher Conservatives.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, conservatives could wonder about a “world-wide conservative crack-up.” Conservatism dominated, but conservatives lost at the polls. Their ideas had triumphed “ending welfare as we know it”), but what ideas were there for the twenty-first century?

Into such uncertainty, men like Brooks – with National Greatness – and Kristol and Robert Kagan – with the Project for a New American Century – sought to raise the right’s sights. Without grandeur, without ambition, Brooks argued, citing Tocqueville, “Democracy has a tendency to slide into nihilistic mediocrity.” The nation whose people had paid any price, borne any burden risked becoming a republic of consumers, sated by cable and easy comforts.

“So America was to strive upward. But toward what? Toward more wealth? Greater scientific achievement? Bigger buildings? No, these were just steps along the way. America’s mission was to advance civilization itself.”

Brooks envisaged a manly American nationalism modeled on Theodore Roosevelt. TR believed in “believed in limited but energetic government, full-bore Americanism, active foreign policy, big national projects (such as the Panama Canal and the national parks), and efforts to smash cozy arrangements (like the trusts) that retarded dynamic meritocracy.” Contractually obliged to punch left, Brooks partly blamed the Left. Once, liberals like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and JFK “possessed high aspirations and a spirit of historical purpose.”

“We choose to go to the moon… and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” Kennedy declared in 1962. This was a fighting liberalism, born of self-confidence. Brooks didn’t note that liberal self-confidence had been undercut by the recognition – rightly – of the failure of the American order to live up to its foundational promises. Instead, he blamed liberal intellectual addiction to irony, of contingency, and the perpetual search for American hypocrisy rather than transcendence.

“Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

But, he went on, “it is primarily the fault of conservatives that America has lost a sense of national mission and national greatness.” The conservatives of the 1990s had no vision, he claimed. They wanted to balance budgets but had no capacity for grand projects. He traced this lack of ambition to the libertarian strain in conservatism. “If liberals choke on the ‘greatness’ part of national greatness,” he wrote “conservatives choke on the ‘national’ part. Most conservatives have come to confuse ‘national’ with ‘federal.’ When they hear of a national effort, they think ‘big government program.’” As Clinton Rossiter wrote in his wonderful Conservatism in America, the libertarian anti-statists of the late nineteenth century had made the American “the first Right in Western history to turn violently against government, the only Right to push individualism far as to assert that a man could never be helped, only harmed, by the assistance of the community.”

Brooks pushed for something more.

It is illustrative, though, to compare National Greatness with Make America Great Again.

Both preoccupations with greatness assume a historical American greatness. For Brooks, renewed greatness was about achieving it again. “The quest for national greatness defines the word ‘American’ and makes it new for every generation,” Brooks wrote. “It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself,” he added. Striving for greatness produces its own reward: burning idealism, a unified vision, the practice of government.

For Trump, though, MAGA doesn’t mean achieving greatness again, but rather casting off the shackles preventing America from returning to it. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world,” Trump said at his second inaugural address. “We will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.” These shackles are both internal (Democrats, “woke” bureaucrats, RINOs, illegal immigrants and so on) and external (countries with whom the United States has a trade deficit, ones under the US nuclear umbrella, the beneficiaries of US aid, et cetera).

Achieving national greatness is aspirational. Brooks took an intentionally Reaganite posture. He wanted the United States to both assume and deserve world leadership. MAGA is narrower. Not a shining city on a hill, it is a closed fortress. In theory, national greatness is ennobling, giving citizens a goal or set of goals to strive for. Trump’s fixation on being taken advantage of or ripped off or disrespected is closer to the irredentist rhetoric of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping’s “Century of Humiliation.” These are ideas that foster an angry, resentful nationalism and devotion to a strong leader to surmount these vague antagonistic forces.

Part of national greatness for Brooks meant effective government. Here, he was working in the neoconservative rather than fusionist tradition. “Many can’t conceive of a public realm that would affirm any of the virtues they hold dear,” Brooks wrote, taking aim at conservative Republicans ushered in by the Gingrich Revolution. But you cannot lead “a great nation if you don’t have an affirmative view of the public realm.” Certainly the Second Trump Administration has exercised the power of the Executive to the absolute hilt – and it is early days – but it is not clear what its positive aims are, at home or abroad. Brooks mocked Congress’s lack of legislative ambition. This is truer now than in the 1990s, when the Republican Congress has turned into either the cheerleaders or enforcers of the Trumpian executive.

In the most charitable understanding, you could argue that DOGE and the Russ Voughts of the world see themselves as believers in effective, limited government. Only the Administrative State has grown to such an extent that a radical transformation of it is required before any good can be done. Such an interpretation is belied by the thoughtlessness and glee with which the government is being chainsawed, and the lack of deference to congressional or judicial oversight.

National greatness requires tangible goals. These missions, Brooks wrote, “have included settling the West, building the highway system, creating the post-war science faculties, exploring space, waging the Cold War, and disseminating American culture throughout the world.” The most successful have had “physical” rather than abstract goals. By contrast, whatever greatness means for Donald Trump, it is nearly totally bound up with his person. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he declared earlier this year. What this – and winning, winning, winning – mean appears to change almost daily as Trump capriciously declares something a success or a failure on a whim.

At his Second Inaugural, Trump did claim he would “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Whether this promise, which obviously owes much to Elon Musk, is serious or just mirrors Musk’s bloviations remains to be seen.

A final difference in Brooksian and Trumpian talk of greatness. Brooks thought national greatness would work to bring Americans together: “the best conservative thought knows that without a sense of national community, we balkanize.” Without a grand vision, it is “easier for demagogues to pit us against one another because there are no countervailing leaders offering common national tasks.” We “turn on outsiders and immigrants.” Brooks saw greatness as something enlarging for the federal government and for the American people. Those great Americans “believed in effort, cultivation, and mastery. They believed in cities and urbanity. They believed in capitals, in monuments, in grandeur.”

For Trump, greatness seems much smaller. In practice, he links greatness to the sort of street-corner respect that leaders and states personally pay – or don’t pay – to him. It’s not a greatness that redounds to the people, elevating them. It resides in the person of Trump. It is defensive. A negative rather than positive greatness; it is based on crass materialisms, not moral aspiration. It is MAGA without greatness.

I have been thinking a lot about George W. Bush’s speechwriter Michael Gerson. He was an architect of Bush’s failed “Compassionate Conservatism.” While most known for his coinage of “Axis of Evil” and drafting other of Bush’s key speeches, Gerson was an ardent and moralistic evangelical Christian. He wanted conservatism to offer more. Like Garry Wills, Gerson came to believe “traditional conservatism may celebrate a weary virtue, but history, in case after case, is only moved by an eager purity.” He Gerson positioned himself as a radical for human dignity. “This is very different from a right-wing extremism that seeks to reimpose a vanished past,” he wrote in his memoir-cum-manifesto. “It is, instead, a vision of human dignity that stands in perpetual challenge to a fallen world. And a world without that idealism would be more fallen still.” Gerson helped develop and then championed the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief or PEPFAR which is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Gerson died at the end of 2022, aghast at the state of the GOP.

The Trumpian right is a pettier, crueler, nastier thing that hangs on who has “the cards” and who thanked whom. Certainly, an inclusive, forward-looking right-wing discourse is, for the moment, dead.

Perhaps it never had a chance. In the aftermath of the Cold War, many conservatives realized that their real enemy was not the Soviet Union. Their truest enemy after all was domestic liberalism, which leant itself to brutal polarization, culture war, and anti-politics in office. Brooks wrote his manifesto precisely because he could see trends were going against his vision of conservatism. “Many of today’s conservatives,” he acknowledged, “use the language of populist resentment more than of meritocratic aspiration.” Or as Gerson noted in his memoir, “one conservative commentator, after the Republicans lost the House and Senate in 2006, talked of this silver lining: ‘At least compassionate conservatism is dead.’ Now is the time, the argument goes, to get back to the real business of conservatism: cutting government.”

Of course, skipping from 1997 to 2025, stopping only to talk about Michael Gerson and PEPFAR, doesn’t tell the whole story. For one, it’s hard to sell the Bush Era right as inclusive when they were the last major opponents to same-sex marriage. And for another, it ignores the War in Iraq. Greatness became grandiosity. After 9/11, instead of pursuing tangible goals against physical targets, Bush launched a “global war on terror.” Hawks linked American greatness with a utopian set of nation-building projects in the Middle East. The wreckage of that war – in part a product of a hubristic sense of greatness (“we’re an empire now”) – torched conservatives’ claims to moral superiority and allowed Trumpism to congeal. Traditionalist and realist critics of the 2000s-era neoconservatives accused them of utopian crusading. Michael Gerson rejected these arguments, holding that “Conservatism without idealism and compassion is dead.” On the War on Terror, at least, the critiques were correct. But the failure of the War and the amoralism of the traditionalist/realist critiques set the stage for the regression from utopianism to cynicism, and from high ideals to base personalism.

The idea of national greatness recurs occasionally. Ross Douthat, for instance, reached back to it as a counteractive to his diagnosis of American decadence in the late 2010s. He pointed to Charles de Gaulle, and his very clear idea of French greatness, as a model of a new American man of the right. Instead, we got Donald Trump again. It’s hard to imagine a post-Trump conservative leader, raised in the Trump era, offering a unifying national vision. Our best hope for a responsible center-right party (for the right you will always have with you) is for some pockets of holdouts today to hold on to older positions or perhaps higher truths and rebuild an alternative conservative identity.