Make America Good Again
It is a stirring statement, often (though falsely) attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, and approvingly quoted by the likes of Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Dwight D. Eisenhower:
I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her fertile fields and boundless forests, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her public school system and her institutions of learning, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good; And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
America is great because America is good: that is the proposition. But is the proposition plausible? And “good” means … what? With the inevitable generalization and simplification that such periodization entails, we might divide responses to what we might call the “goodness” proposition into three broad periods.
A Biblical Civilization
For most of America’s history, from its founding through approximately the 1960s, most Americans embraced the proposition, and they conceived of goodness basically in biblical terms. “Biblical” seems the right word here, not “Christian.” That is because although, historically, a majority of Americans have considered themselves to be Christians, historians like Perry Miller and Mark Noll have shown that at least for political purposes, the national ethos owed more to the Hebrew scripture that Christians call the Old Testament than it did to the more specifically Christian New Testament. National goodness, as opposed to personal goodness, was understood more in terms of Deuteronomy than of the Sermon on the Mount.
In a recent massive study, Noll documents how at least through the Civil War period, Americans strove to create a “biblical civilization.” The Bible was prolifically published, bought, read, and quoted. And Americans strove to bring their public affairs into line with biblical precepts. They believed that in doing so they were fulfilling a covenant with God, and that God would bless the nation insofar as it strove to be “good” under biblical standards.
Major caveats are needed, of course. In reality, Americans (like humans generally) never succeeded in conforming their conduct to biblical precepts. Some of their failings reflected just the usual human phenomenon of trying but falling short, as happens to many of us every year with our resolutions to lose forty pounds or to read the complete works of Shakespeare. Some of the failings were more egregious: major, hypocritically rationalized transgressions such as slavery or the forcible displacement of Native Americans.
Even so, and even if the commitment to goodness as biblically understood was often more an aspiration than an accomplished reality, the aspiration was nonetheless real … and important. It set a standard for judging the nation’s institutions and practices. And it inspired numerous efforts, individual and collective, to approximate the ideal. Abolitionism, universal education, equal rights for women and later for minorities, and reduction in the consumption of alcohol were all movements inspired by the aspiration to national goodness. So were efforts to help rebuild Europe after World War II or to provide aid to people abroad afflicted by severe poverty, malnutrition, and disease.
One of the most recent and important political and cultural movements rooted in this biblically conceived aspiration to goodness was the civil rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Writer John Fea observes:
Most historians now agree that this powerful social movement in American life was driven by the Christian faith of its proponents. As historian David Chappel has recently argued, the story of the civil rights movement is less about the triumph of progressive and liberal ideas and more about the revival of an Old Testament prophetic tradition that led African Americans to hold their nation accountable for the decidedly unchristian behavior it showed to so many of its citizens.
A “Transvaluation of Values”?
At about the same time that Dr. King was advancing this biblically based cause, however, the nation was on the verge of a kind of moral revolution. And this change had a legal and political dimension. Jurists (like Justice William Brennan) and political philosophers (like John Rawls) were working to secularize law and public discourse in America. Versions differed, naturally, but the basic idea was that the constitutional ideal of “separation of church and state” or the political ideals of inclusiveness and fairness, or both, meant that although religion would be valued and protected in the private sphere, decisions and discourse in the public or governmental sphere should be based solely on secular considerations. Biblical or theistic beliefs and values were to be respected, but they were for individuals, not for the nation.
So the Bible would be taken out of public education (or at least considered only for its literary or historical significance), and laws and public policies would be justified on purely secular grounds. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that government violates the Constitution if it does or says things that send a message “endorsing religion.”
Although such secularization sounded the death knell for the quest for a biblical civilization (or for whatever remained of that quest), it did not mean an end of the aspiration to national goodness. Indeed, in some quarters the insistence on goodness became more relentless and puritanical than it had been before. Deviations from prevailing standards of goodness in opinions or conversation might disqualify a person from working as a professor, a public official, even a sportscaster or coach. But if the aspiration to goodness persisted and even intensified, over time secularization did produce a dramatically different public understanding of what the sought-for “good” is.
Such changes are complex, obviously, and hence difficult to capture in a brief description. In some respects, the new goodness owed much to earlier notions, but in other respects it stood the older notions on their head. Even to find a label for the new standards is difficult: the term “woke,” once embraced by secular progressives, came to be resented; and it is impolite to describe people by a term they reject.
But, still simplifying, we might say this much: the biblical view held that humans are created “in the image of God.” That revolutionary proposition had supplied both a rationale for treating humans, all humans, as infinitely precious or possessed of “dignity,” and also a criterion for governing human behavior. We humans are subject to the law of God (historically understood to be expressed in biblical precepts).
By contrast, the new goodness retained a commitment to human dignity, a commitment that was now “free-standing,” to borrow a term from Rawls, not grounded in the idea of imago Dei, but that eschewed reliance on God and the Bible (at least for public purposes). The result was that the source and locus of goodness was no longer God, but the individual. “Love God” and “Love your neighbor,” the first and second commandments from both the Old and New Testaments, were replaced by “Be true to yourself.” And law, public policy, and political philosophy now devoted themselves to realizing a world in which every person could live in accordance with his, her, or their “conception of the good,” as liberal philosophers put it. As Barack Obama explained in a video addressed to young gay people, “each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness; to make the most of our talents; to speak our minds; to not fit in; most of all, to be true to ourselves.”
Viewed favorably, the quest now was not to fulfill a national covenant with God, but to promote individual “liberty,” “authenticity,” and “self-fulfillment.” Viewed more critically, “authenticity” and “self-fulfillment” were euphemisms for “selfishness.” Proponents of abortion rights or the assured availability of contraceptives deployed the more ennobling rhetoric, naturally, but critics often discerned an agenda that resonated more with the pejorative description.
Decades earlier, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had announced, and celebrated, the “death of God.” The consequences of this momentous development would not be realized immediately, Nietzsche thought. But over time, as the news of God’s death came to be assimilated, the result would be a “transvaluation of values.” Much of what had previously been deemed to be bad would now become good, and vice versa.
Especially in areas like marriage and sexual morality, the secularization of law and public discourse produced just such a reversal. To be sure, such developments were complex, and the new goodness reflected both continuity with and revolt against the older standards. Take, for example, the New Testament precept “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” This idea was embraced by the newer ethos and applied with a vengeance, but only partially. It was now wrong to criticize anyone who deviated from biblical standards of chastity, marriage, and sexual identity, for example (“Judge not”) and people who did continue publicly to apply the older standards might be fiercely condemned (and thus judged) as bigots, sexists, or homophobes. In some contexts, moreover, the vehement and often unforgiving application of the new goodness could seem at least as intolerant and stifling as the older morality had been.
So it is hardly surprising that the new goodness might itself provoke deep resentment. And it did, but with a surprising, and distressing, twist.
A Retreat from National Goodness
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2024 is generally and plausibly viewed as a revolt against the suffocating pieties of the movement formerly known as “woke.” The nation was to be taken forcefully off the “progressive” track on which it had been traveling and returned to its former glory. In other words: “Make America Great Again.”
But although this might have been the hope of many who supported Trump, “Make America Great Again” has not turned out to mean a return to goodness in the older or traditional sense. On the contrary, the repudiation of progressive or “woke” goodness has become more nearly a revolt against goodness—not personal goodness, but goodness as a national ideal, that is.
The progressive revolution respected religion (or at least purported to) but relegated it to the private sphere. The more recent counterrevolution does essentially the same thing, except with goodness rather than religion.
Obviously, national policies under Trump I and Trump II have been multifaceted, and this is not the place to attempt any overall assessments. On a policy-by-policy, decision-by-decision basis, most of us will approve of some of what the Trump administrations have done and will disapprove of other parts. By now, it seems clear that it is next to impossible to offer any assessment that will not be incorrigibly controversial: people differ dramatically not only in their evaluations but also in their views of “the facts.”
Despite these difficulties of interpretation, I think some rough agreement might be possible with respect to what we might call the philosophy, or the strategy, or maybe just the attitude that drives the second Trump administration’s various decisions and policies regarding everything from immigration to foreign policy to tariffs.
It is a stance of “America First.” And “America First” means “Us First.” We will do what is best for us. Thus, spending billions to help afflicted people in foreign nations might be good for them, but it does nothing to benefit us. (A debatable proposition, to be sure: but this is clearly the attitude driving the gutting of USAID.) Allowing foreigners to live among us, receiving benefits and taking jobs, does not benefit us. (Another highly debatable but nonetheless popular proposition.) Although we have no plausible claim to a place like Greenland, it would benefit us to have it, and so we will take it—and will punish with crippling tariffs any nation that opposes the takeover. (Until, that is, within the course of a single day, the president reverses his stance and decides that we will not seize Greenland after all.)
It is all, unapologetically, about us. Agreement should be possible on this point because for the most part, the president and his supporters hardly pretend otherwise. On the contrary, they proudly flaunt this Us First attitude and suggest that the sentimental souls who whine about our duties to others—to foreigners, to noncitizens, to nations that have been our allies in the past—are simply refusing to face up to reality. In a recent televised interview with Jake Tapper, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, expressed the attitude clearly and forcefully. Explaining the current administration’s philosophy in foreign policy, Miller said: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Notice the qualifier: “in the real world.” The clear suggestion is that those who decline to acquiesce in this “might makes right” philosophy are deluded dreamers who are not living in “the real world.”
This is a familiar enough philosophy. It is evident in the political counsel for which Machiavelli became justly renowned. It is memorably conveyed in the speech Thucydides attributes to the Athenian delegation in making its demand that the neutral island of Melos submit to Athenian rule:
Since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong you have done us—and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that … you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both. … For you know as well as we do that questions of justice are settled by equality of power, and that the strong exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.
Substitute, say, Greenland for Melos, and Stephen Miller or Donald Trump could hardly have put it better.
To be sure, there are ironies in this strategy, or in this philosophy. MAGA was taken by many to be a repudiation of the progressive view, expressed in the 1619 Project and sometimes in thinking such as Critical Legal Studies, that the historical essence of America has been in the ruthless exploitation of weaker peoples—African slaves, Native Americans, and others. But far from repudiating that cynical view, the MAGA strategy as interpreted by Trump associates like Miller effectively confirms and embraces the progressive assessment. If we suppress Critical Legal Studies, say, that is because it is not in our interest that those parts of our history be taught.
There are also dangers in the current philosophy or strategy, even for those who think they support it. Before embracing Us First, it is prudent to consider who will constitute the “us.” Sometimes the “us/them” divide seems to correspond to Americans versus others. Sometimes it suggests “citizens vs. noncitizens.” But sometimes it means supporters of the current administration versus people who are perceived as opposing it: members of the previous Democratic administration, judges who rule against Trump, close advisers or cabinet members under Trump I who failed to manifest complete and unqualified loyalty to whatever the president wanted to do.
In the end, though, it might be that Stephen Miller—and Machiavelli, and the Athenian delegation to Melos—were right. Maybe “might makes right” is, as Miller put it, “the iron law of the world since the beginning of time.” Relentlessly seeking to further “our” own interests might be the path back to greatness—if, that is, greatness is defined in terms of power and wealth.
All of that might be true. Then again, it might not be, even on a purely selfish conception of greatness.
What seems undeniable, though, is that this is not the philosophy expressed in what I have called the goodness proposition, or the ideal that characterized America from its founding up until the advent of modern progressivism—or even after the advent of progressivism under a revised and arguably debased conception of goodness. It is not a philosophy that even attempts to realize “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln put it in a speech desperately trying to bring Americans together.
And this Us First strategy or philosophy is manifestly a rejection of the counsel that “America is great because America is good,” and that “If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” Conversely, those who embrace that Tocquevillian counsel might fervently embrace “Make America Great Again,” but must also pray and desperately hope that this slogan will once again come to be understood to mean “Make America Good Again.”