The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, July 4, 2026

Notebook: When Ronald Reagan used the phrase “make America great again” in his first campaign in 1980, what period was he referring to? What period is Trump referring to? Ask any magazoid what period they have in mind when they imagine a better America, and the first answer is likely to be a glazed look. Americans don’t know their history. They’re not capable of comparing decades, or centuries. Not just Americans. Gaullism was a Frenchified version of maga before maga. The neonazi National Front of Jean-Mari LePen, rebranded National Rally to soften its fascism as it nears the French presidency next April–if Edouard Philippe can’t hold it together–draws its popular energy from the mythology of a better France, in a country that has never known a decade since the Gauls when its reactionaries didn’t mourn a better France. Other European countries’ rightwing shifts  freebase nostalgia for nonexistent eras as ignorantly as any magazoid. Even if Americans knew their history, they’d have a hard time pointing to the “great” era they have in mind, if they want to make “again” stick. Reagan did not mean the 1960s, which he reviled: he crushed the protesters at Berkley’s People Park 10 years before DeSantis was born. He was just as dismissive of the civil rights era of the 1950s. He was elected on a promise to reverse the New Deal, so the 1930s and 40s can’t be it. The 1920s maybe? That decade has always been the lodestar of conservatives, a decade of Republican presidents, Howard Taft as chief justice, a Republican Congress, immigration stopped cold with that era’s equivalent of Muslim bans (yellow bans, back then, and Balkan bans, East European bans, Arab bans). It had its jazz, its cars, its Carousel-of-Progress‘s “great big beautiful tomorrow” of appliances and new material comforts, but was also the decade of Main Street and Babbitt, of KKK power, lynchings and Jim Crow, of Teapot Dome and other scandals of corruption run amuck in federal and state governments free of regulation, of Prohibition-drunk crime and record inequality. We can go further back, the decades of the obliteration of the Indian, the Civil War, slavery: which is it? Ask your magazoid friends–and not just them: ask nevertrumpers and liberals, too: which decade, exactly, would you like to live in other than this one? What version of your iPhone, what flatscreen TV size, what AI lure would you give up? Then ask: what got us here? The answer isn’t either or, but the dialectic of either or. It is the ongoing stew and clash of either or, without which we’re just another Saudi Arabia or Singapore. We decay only when we wish back for a greater time that never existed. That look back is the look away from our responsibilities and callings today, from who we are now, not who we once were and thankfully cannot ever,  should never be, again. The phrase make America great again is its own condemnation. It is all blinders and contempt. It is phrased in aspiration.  But it seethes with nihilism. 

But [Abraham Lincoln] did not often let himself go. As one reads his speeches one feels that an English diffidence held him back-this and the strong prose of his environment. Like a true Anglo-Saxon he was reluctant to speak out, afraid to let his emotions seize upon his speech. Only at the last did that diffidence yield to complete unconsciousness. The Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural are marked by the sincerity and self-effacement that ennobled the words of John Brown in the Virginia court-room-it is the eloquence which rises from the heart when life has been felt in its tragic reality, an eloquence that Webster could not rise to. Such words come only to those who have been purified by fire; they are the distillation of bitter experience. But the mass of his speeches are in quite another manner that of the simple, everyday world that bred him. He had none of the itch of pub-licity that afflicts the second-rate mind. Webster was a magnificent poseur; Edward Everett repeated the same academic oration a hundred times; but Lincoln was too modest to pose and too honest to turn parrot and speak by rote. He was a man who loved to talk thought clothed itself in whimsical humor. He did not wear his heart on his sleeve, but like Mark Twain he let it slip out in a witticism. 

–From  Vernon Louis Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1927).

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