Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift had a particularly astute essay today, called A Meditation on American Greatness. The main point is that MAGA folk think of greatness as a state of being, while what it can only be is an act of (partial) doing:
The problem with framing “greatness” as a state of being and pinning it to America in some past era is that [the] downsides either go away or become insignificant. Worse, saying America was great then, but is not great now, implicitly promotes the idea of going back. And none of those eras is a time we should want to go back to. Jim Crow America is nothing to be nostalgic about, even if that’s who we were on D-Day.
Idealizing past greatness also makes an unfair connection between our great and terrible deeds. We created unprecedented economic growth in spite of our social injustices, not because of them. Forcing gays back into the closet or women back into the kitchen won’t end inflation or bring back well-paid working class jobs.
I think anyone, no matter how critical of the United States, would acknowledge this country or its people have done some good, even great things. It's the Right's inability to allow for admission of the many wrongs that shuts down discussion.
And he's correct that it's the Right that believes in a zero-sum world:
Believing that the goodness in the world is a limited pile of pirate treasure, and then seizing more than your share of it, is a very shallow conception of greatness. Our greatness needs to be greater than that.
It's a dark day to look for the light, so I appreciated Muder's commitment to do great things again for more people than we ever have before.
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