“Make America Great Again.” It’s the anti-social contract and thus Anti-American stale fart rehash from the 1980's rallying cry that launched cringe worthy red hats and even more awkward family dinners. But if you’ve ever tried asking a diehard MAGA cult lemming the two most obvious follow-up questions “When exactly was America great?” and “When did it stop being great?” One will notice a curious thing: suddenly, the room gets real quiet… Or loud. But definitely not historically accurate. Because here’s the thing: the timeline is mysterious, contradictory, and shaped more by vibes than facts. The answer is never 100% clear, but it always smells faintly of lead paint, coal dust, and garment sweatshops for the ladies or meatpacking plants with zero health codes for the fellas.
When pressed, a typical dominionist end times death cult nested in MAGA cult member or low info SLEP cult adjacent enthusiast might mumble something about the 1950s, a time they peaked during or are too young to have experienced but are sure was better because they saw a Chevrolet commercial from that era featuring a guy with a tucked in plaid shirt and big belt buckle. A few might say the 1980s, when men were men, women had beehive hair and wore shoulder pads, and Criptkeeper Thatcher and a literal actor taught America how to golden shower via pretending wealth trickles down. But ask for specifics, and suddenly you’re in the Twilight Zone of selective amnesia. When did America stop being great? Again, answers vary. Some say 2008 when the White House went half black, others say 2020 (COVID and masks and lattes), and a few say 1971, when we went off the gold standard and “everything went downhill”. The common thread? None of the answers involve nuance, data, or books longer than a meme. Here’s the twist no one admits out loud: when MAGA says “great again,” what they really mean is:
“Let’s return to the Gilded Age—a nightmare fuel powered period of time spanning roughly the 1870s to the early 1900s which were the three decades after the civil war. The Gilded Age was a time when, due to massive environmental damage from industrialization caused a tiny sliver small group of monovalent THEY LIVE skull-faced industrialists to amass staggering wealth and power primarily through steel and oil, creating the country's first moguls and monopolies for the monopolists, while laborers endured exploitation, union busting, deadly working conditions, and the weekends, which would eventually be brought to us by organized labor and unions, had yet to exist. 14 hours a day brutal physical labor was the default and that applied to your young kids too. Teenagers or even pre-teens could earn a nickel for over half a day of coal-sifting and they all cried themselves to sleep every night.” If they didn't want to be slaving in factories of bloody horror, dirty, transient, ragamuffin street kids, were picking pockets or robbing at gunpoint. And if the women didn't want to be in the hellscape factories, working in brothels was one of few other options. And for the non-laboring men - public homeless style drunkenness was everywhere.
First, there is the shallow aesthetic. The Gilded Age wasn’t named for golden prosperity but for the superficial glitter covering a period of deep pain inequality. Trumpelstilskin's brand, which is classless trashy rich, has always reveled in tacky gold: gilded walls, gold-plated toilets, and skyscrapers bearing his egomaniacal name in giant, boastful letters. This celebration of ostentatious wealth mirrors the extravagant displays of past ultra monarchists as well as industrial barons whose industries resulted in cities being hidden under dark clouds via thousands of coal smoke stacks. There was little to no middle class, just a slave class that lived in tenement housing if lucky or shanty sheds while dying of dysentery while a couple dozen oligarchs had Versailles style mega mansions. It was a psychopaths wet dream which destroyed rural egalitarianism, not to mention a massive decline in moral values, not to mention its redlining of a spiritual decline.
From decades of doing Cocaine and Adderall and thus having fecal incontinence and thus wearing adult diapers, Gassy Gatsby, and any Nazgul like him, don't directly invoked the Gilded Age in speeches, but channel its spirit wanting to return America to this awful period which they deem as returning a nation to its former glory —valorizing morbid wealth, undermining people, and blurring the line between business and government. Just as Gilded Age tycoons turned politics into an extension of their empires, in a modern sense they turn the White House into a symbol of celebrity griftfesting. In this same modern sense, The Gilded Gaslighter didn’t just echo Gilded Age aesthetics; he tried to revive its political economy, where power is concentrated and wealth is seen as a sign of virtue rather than something to be balanced against social responsibility. From his classless penthouse to his admiration for moguls like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Velveeta Voldemort embodies many of the values of the sociopathic compassionless late 19th century elite from this time who could care less about the suffering of the country's people. Much like Gilded Age tycoons who called in private militias to crush strikes (e.g., the Homestead Strike or Pullman Strike), The Lord of Lies positioned organized labor as an obstacle to “freedom” and economic efficiency. His skill lay in repackaging elite interests in populist language. Just as Gilded Age magnates often posed as “captains of industry” lifting America to greatness, The MAGA Maharaja, always frame their corporate tax cuts and deregulation for business owners and executives as victories for the “little guy” and far too many red cult diaper suckers whose wages remained stagnant gobble it up. In reality, at the time of this writing oligarchic wealth soars to record heights while wealth inequality deepens again to record heights, and the structural concerns of working-class people—stagnant wages, lack of affordable healthcare, insecure jobs—go largely unaddressed again.
In many ways, MAGAism is less a break from American history than a return to a deep and problematic tradition—one where power is gilded, not shared, and where the worker is celebrated at rallies but abandoned in policy. It's not about real prosperity for 99.9% of people—it’s about idolizing a cartoonish version of power and order, where criminal robber barons called “commodores” ran the show and everyone else knew their place (usually at the bottom of the mine). Ultimately, MAGA’s lowest common denominator America is a vague dream featuring anything positive set in a Norman Rockwell painting that omits segregation, union-busting, tuberculosis, and the fact that most people had atrocious lives and then died at 42. So next time someone wears, writes or says “Make America Great Again,” ask, “When, exactly, was that?” Then sit back, pop some popcorn, and watch as they try to reverse-engineer a golden but really gilded age out of coal dust and bootstraps.