Make America Great Again New Era
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Did y'all ever wonder why Donald Trump's "Make America Dandy Over again" slogan took such root amidst the Republican base of operations? Did it symbolize a return to an age when wages were higher and jobs more secure? Or was information technology coded racial language designed to signal a rollback to a time when people of colour (and women) knew their identify? In the soul-searching and recrimination among Democrats afterwards Hillary Clinton's defeat, both theories accept their champions.
Just a closer look at conservative rhetoric in recent years reveals that "Make America Bully Again" was non Trump's invention. Information technology evolved from a phrase that became central to the Republican establishment during the Obama years: "American exceptionalism." People frequently equate the expression with the notion that God made America "a urban center upon a hill," in the words of the Puritan colonist John Winthrop. However, as University of California-Berkeley folklore professor Jerome Karabel noted in a 2011 article, this usage only came into vogue after Barack Obama became president. Previously it was mainly used by academics to hateful that America is an exception compared with other Western democracies, for meliorate or worse, as illustrated by its tiptop-notch universities or its bare-basic gun control.
Prior to 2008, "American exceptionalism" appeared in news articles a handful of times a year, only after Obama was elected the references skyrocketed, largely because of a drumbeat from Republicans. One time the tea party wave made John Boehner speaker of the Business firm in 2010, for case, he summarized the growing consensus among Republicans: Obama had turned his back on the Founding Fathers to the point where he "refused to talk about American exceptionalism." (In fact, in 2009 the president had stated, "I believe in American exceptionalism.") The phrase's popularity in GOP talking points—often in attacks on Obama's "socialist" policies—paralleled the spread of conspiracy theories about his citizenship and supposed jihadi sympathies.
Defending "American exceptionalism" was a theme of Hand Romney's 2012 entrada; he blasted Obama for supposedly thinking that "America's just another nation" destined to go "a European-style entitlement society." Romney'southward campaign co-chair John Sununu added that Obama should "acquire how to be an American." (He later on apologized.)
The 2016 Republican presidential candidates and their surrogates sang the same tune. When Trick News pundit Sean Hannity asked Jeb Bush-league for his thoughts on exceptionalism, Bush replied, "I practise believe in American exceptionalism," dissimilar Obama, who "is disrespecting our history and the boggling nature of our state." Rudy Giuliani was more explicit. "I practise not believe that the president loves America," he asserted, suggesting Obama did not think "we're the well-nigh exceptional country in the world." During a speech a month later in Selma, Alabama, the president pointed out that the ongoing fight for civil rights is a cornerstone of what makes America exceptional.
To get more of a quantitative sense of the phrase's evolution, I analyzed the Republican Political party platform. All political party platforms typically emphasize faith in American greatness, but betwixt 1856 and 2008, the GOP never used the expression "American exceptionalism" or even the adjective "infrequent" to describe the country. By contrast, the concluding section of the 2012 Republican platform lambasting the Obama presidency was titled "American exceptionalism." The 2016 platform put the phrase into the outset line of its preamble: "We believe in American exceptionalism." The evolution of "American exceptionalism" into an anti-Obama rallying cry with nativist overtones evoked earlier appeals to "states' rights" to rouse whites resenting the end of segregation.
In his book Fourth dimension to Go Tough: Making America #one Again, Trump, besides, framed his agenda as a defense of "American exceptionalism." "Possibly my biggest beef with Obama is his view that there's nothing special or exceptional nearly America—that we're no unlike than any other country." Trump later adopted a catchier slogan, "Brand America Cracking Again," but it retained the nativist overtones and racial dog whistles of the offset. Paired with Trump'south open conspiracy-mongering about Obama'south forged birth document and supposed Muslim religion, information technology amplified and dramatized the Republican establishment's slyer assertions virtually Obama'southward united nations-American values.
Trump would somewhen abandon dog whistles in favor of blunter race-baiting. What remains to be seen is whether he and the Republican establishment will proceed flashing the "exceptionalism" betoken in the post-Obama years—to paint new opponents every bit un-American—or whether that language was uniquely deployed to delegitimize the nation's first black president. At the very to the lowest degree, it provided fertile footing for Trumpism.
Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/american-exceptionalism-maga-trump-obama/
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