Defining MAGA

Been around 250 years. We will be around another 250

On July 17, 1980, Ronald Reagan accepted the Republican nomination for president. In his acceptance speech, he said, “For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!”

Make America great again! He said it at a time when President Carter declared a national malaise and Muslims in Iran held 51 Americans hostage. The nation was hung over from Lyndon Johnson’s misadventure in Vietnam and the failure of his Great Society programs to deliver on their promises.

It took Jimmah but 4 years to kill the buzz we got from the bicentennial. Reagan brought it back with a smile, sharp wit and an optimism worthy of our Founding fathers. He replaced Carter’s mourning with Morning in America.

Reagan defined American greatness as its people, not its government. We the People are the country.

In his re-election campaign, he said, “The greatness of America doesn’t begin in Washington; it begins with each of you—in the mighty spirit of free people under God, in the bedrock values you live by each day in your families, neighborhoods, and workplaces.”

In 1983, in his speech calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, Reagan said, “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

25 years later, Obama’s election proved Reagan was right about ceasing greatness.

In his farewell address, Reagan said, “A tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

The problem today is millions of those newcomers just absolutely hate America because even with control of the schools and the media, Democrats cannot generate enough self-loathing to keep them in power.

You cannot reconcile Christianity with Islamism.

Reagan’s words echo those of Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider who became president and was so good he wound up on Mount Rushmore. He finally got a presidential library, which opens this weekend in Medora, North Dakota, where he once had a ranch. The Badlands were chosen because even though he was born in New York, he was a cowboy at heart.

In 1886, in one of his first public speeches, TR said, “We all of us feel, most rightly and properly, that we belong to the greatest nation that has ever existed on the earth.”

He developed that theme as he stormed through life. Years later he said, “A nation’s greatness lies in its possibility of achievement in the present, and nothing helps it more than the consciousness of achievement in the past.”

On December 17, 1903, amid his presidency, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, achieved something mankind had sought for thousands of year—heavier than air flight.

66 years later, America landed a man on the moon who planted the Stars and Stripes there.

57 years after that, an American is capturing rockets to reuse as he plans to plant an American flag on Mars. David Bowie asked Is There Life on Mars? Elon Musk plans to make the answer yes some day soon.

Can’t? Americans see that word as a challenge.

Ike, too, believed in American greatness, saying, “The freedom of the individual and his willingness to follow real leadership are at the core of America’s strength.”

He also said, “America is exactly as strong as the initiative, courage, understanding, and loyalty of the individual citizen.”

Loyalty matters. Obama refused to honor the flag by covering his heart with his hand and Democrats nominated him.

On December 1, 1862, as the Civil War dragged on, Lincoln said, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

The last best hope on Earth. It’s the perfect encapsulation of America’s place in the world. God did not put us here to fail. Like the Blues Brothers, we are on a mission from God.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address was a magnificent summary of the nation’s political purpose:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Conceived in liberty.

Let’s fact check that, please. What did the Father of Our Country say in his Farewell Address as he left the presidency?

In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember, especially, that for the efficient management of your common interests, in a country so extensive as ours, a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property.

His words echo Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant preamble to the Declaration of Independence whose adoption we celebrate on Saturday—and every day of the year, really.

You may have noticed that I managed to quote every man on Mount Rushmore plus Eisenhower and Reagan. Their greatness lies in fighting for the right of Americans—real Americans—to make America great again.