The phrase ‘Make America Great Again’ hides something disturbing

Posted by | January 2, 2017 10:30 | Filed under: News Behaving Badly Politics

It sounds innocuous, even patriotic. But unless you’ve experienced America on the non-caucasian side of the ethnic spectrum, you may not get the implicit message. Michele Norris of NPR explained why minorities bristle at the phrase on CBS’s Face the Nation:

“In the phrase ‘Make America Great Again’ there’s one word that if you are a person of color, that you sort of stumble over, and it’s the word ‘again’.” Norris observed. “Because you’re talking about going back to a time that was not very comfortable for people of color. They did not have opportunities, they were relegated to the back of the line.”

“And this was a country that — to be honest — was built on the promise of white prosperity above everything else,” she added. “And for a lot of people, when they hear that message, ‘Make America Great Again,’ deeply encoded in that message is a return to a time where white Americans can assume a certain amount of prosperity.”

According to Norris, Trump’s win was made possible by white people who feel like they are “not at the front of the line.”

Watch the segment here:



Click here for reuse options!
Copyright 2017 Liberaland
By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.

25 responses to The phrase ‘Make America Great Again’ hides something disturbing

  1. mea_mark January 2nd, 2017 at 10:42

    It is why our next president will go down in the history books as one of, if not the worst president ever in our history. He is a clueless demagogue conning white Americans and dividing the country for his own personal gain. It is #Derp45 …

    • Larry Schmitt January 2nd, 2017 at 11:02

      He will rival William Henry Harrison, who wasn’t president long enough to do anything because he died of pneumonia after 32 days in office, because he literally didn’t have sense to come in out of the rain:
      “He took the oath of office on March 4, 1841, a cold and wet day. He wore neither an overcoat nor hat, rode on horseback to the ceremony
      rather than in the closed carriage that had been offered him, and
      delivered the longest inaugural address in American history.”

      • Gina Bousquet January 2nd, 2017 at 11:08

        Unbelievable piece of History! Thank you Larry!

      • anothertoothpick January 2nd, 2017 at 12:11

        Good Old Tippecanoe.

        • bpollen January 2nd, 2017 at 16:21

          Don’t try to stand up in it and maybe your won’t Tippecanoe…

    • amersham1046 January 2nd, 2017 at 16:01

      .’ He is a clueless demagogue’ remember if you can not say something nice don’t say anything at all–
      OPPS , you were being nice to the Turnip

  2. oldfart January 2nd, 2017 at 10:49

    “Trump’s win was made possible by white people who feel like they are “not at the front of the line.”

    …And come 2040 they WON’T be anymore.

  3. Larry Schmitt January 2nd, 2017 at 10:58

    Make America 1953 again. That’s what they really mean.

    • mea_mark January 2nd, 2017 at 13:01

      Don’t you mean 1853?

  4. anothertoothpick January 2nd, 2017 at 11:10

    He is talking about an era when America looked much better on TV then it did in real life.

    A world of Anderson’s and Nelson and Cleavers.

    An antiseptic, idealized unflawed America.

    Parents were never unjust or unwise in the way they treated their children. A world were none of the dads hated their jobs, though it was often unclear what Ozzie actually did but whatever it was it was respectable and valuable. A world that moms never worked.

    A world when if people did things badly, the always did them with good intentions.

    A world in which when Beaver Cleaver was being threatened yet agin kWh the punishment of being sent up to his room, most kids could only think to wish for a home of his own with an upstairs room to go to.

    Nostalgia for the fifties is not so much that life was better in the fifties but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.

    • Dwendt44 January 2nd, 2017 at 12:42

      And minorities either didn’t exist or were very very rare.

      • anothertoothpick January 2nd, 2017 at 13:11

        In reality these shows were NOT art imitates life.

        But a lot of people seem to think they were..

    • james, lord of devonshire January 2nd, 2017 at 14:33

      I’ve complained many times about the way that disabilities were handled in this “sanitised world”

      have you seen the episode of Quantum Leap where Scott Bakula jumped into a guy with a mental disability?

    • Lyndia January 2nd, 2017 at 23:23

      Unflawed America? Wasn’t Emmett Till, murdered in the 50’s? Plenty of lynching in the south, single women were discriminated against, for example, they could not get a credit card or rent an apartment. Few women worked outside of the home. That is the reality of the climate in the 50’s. What was portrayed on TV, was BS.

  5. labman57 January 2nd, 2017 at 11:10

    Yep. Trump’s goal for the next 4 years:
    Make America great again … for wealthy white Christian males.

    • anothertoothpick January 2nd, 2017 at 12:05

      Yesterday on C-Span, (I think it was yesterday, hahahah) There was one of those repub talking balloon heads explaining how it was the “good people” that voted for pumpkin head.

  6. Suzanne McFly January 2nd, 2017 at 11:48

    How is this a story? This has been known since the day he said he wanted to “make America Great again”. He has never hid his racist ideology, just none of the reporters questioned him how he was planning to make American great again.

    • anothertoothpick January 2nd, 2017 at 11:55

      And we got it stuck in our asses.

  7. arc99 January 2nd, 2017 at 12:29

    Someone should ask the people wearing those MAGA caps to specify an exact date mm/dd/ccyy when America stopped being great. Or at least give us a ccyy.

    I was born black in this country 64 years ago. I remember our family sitting around the kitchen table planning our summer vacation based not on our budget and interests but which destinations had hotels which would rent rooms to black families. You will never convince me that being “great” includes tolerating Jim Crow segregation, which this country did for almost a century.

    We have come a long way since then. And if anyone asks me for a date when America finally became great, I tell them that as far as I am concerned, it is June 12, 1967. That is when the last legal vestige of Jim Crow was stricken from American law by the SCOTUS decision on Lovings vs Virginia.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5e175bff64175f729817547ab825f6e70a8eec68efde60d20d980febda724c9b.jpg

  8. bpollen January 2nd, 2017 at 16:19

    Pining for the good ol’ days, when we were importing slaves and killing natives.

    • Duke Woolworth January 3rd, 2017 at 05:49

      Maybe not so far back: just to the days when I got the shock of my ten year old Ohio life when we visited a national park in Virginia where I saw segregated plumbing.

      • bpollen January 3rd, 2017 at 15:52

        Though from the south, I only saw what you might call the “social” bigotry. Never saw that kind of institutional bigotry.

        • Duke Woolworth January 5th, 2017 at 06:09

          This was 1951, to which many whites would like to return. A time of polio and childhood diseases run rampant. The good old days.

          • bpollen January 5th, 2017 at 17:55

            The Korean War, the Cold War, anti-communist hysteria, the Great Flood, open-air nuclear bomb tests (complete with military observers to flood with radiation for…???)

            But at least they had “I Love Lucy”… in Black & White.

            • Duke Woolworth January 5th, 2017 at 22:28

              Everybody smoked, and until Kennedy, wore hats. To paraphrase an ad: “Nine out of ten doctors who tried camels went back to women.”
              Segregated plumbing, cranberries with cancer, Christine Jorgensen, Kon-Tiki, bias-ply tires, drum brakes, flathead engines, lead paint, leaded fuel…

Leave a Reply