The MAGA movement has fractured recently over the contentious issues of foreign military intervention and government spending, with each faction accusing their opponents of betraying MAGA. This raises a question: What does it mean to be MAGA?
Considering “MAGA” as a brand name for a political movement (which is how it is commonly used), there is no way to definitively answer that question. But if we take the acronym literally and examine what it would mean to truly “Make America Great Again,” the matter is much clearer and more significant.
To know what would make America great again, we must understand what America is. Obviously America is a nation, but one unlike any other. As Englishman G.K. Chesterton observed:
“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.”
I do not here claim that America’s founding creed—what both Ayn Rand and Leonard E. Read called “Americanism”—is the only thing that defines it. Some argue that other national character traits are also essential. Regardless, the convictions that drove America’s founding fathers are certainly essential to what America is. America is defined by its founding philosophy: the ideals that were proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that motivated the American Revolution, and that were the chief objectives of the framers of the Constitution.
America has never completely lived up to those ideals, but to the extent that it has, it has thrived. America’s foundational values—its moral greatness—are the root cause of its rise to material and cultural greatness throughout most of its history. “This,” as Read wrote, “is the rock upon which the whole ‘American miracle’ was founded.”
What are some of these values? As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence—echoing John Locke and expressing the prevailing ideology of Americans at the time—the sole purpose of government is to secure the rights of the governed. And when the founding generation spoke of “rights,” they meant Lockean rights to person and property. As the Preamble of the Constitution later put it, the function of government is to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence…”; in other words, to protect its citizens’ rights against domestic criminals and foreign aggressors through courts, officers of the law, and military forces—nothing less, and certainly nothing more. It isn’t government’s role to provide people with food, education, or medicine. And what people do with their own persons and property is not the government’s business to promote, prohibit, or otherwise regulate. Government, according to America’s founding philosophy, has one job: protect rights.
Another “self-evident truth” proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence is that governments should never become “destructive of these ends.” In other words, as Frédéric Bastiat later eloquently expressed in his powerful pamphlet The Law, governments should never violate the very rights they are created to protect: not even if it’s for the victims’ “own good” or if it’s to take from some to give to others. To make this abundantly clear, the framers added a Bill of Rights to the Constitution.
How do these principles apply to the recent policy issues that have split MAGA? First let us consider U.S. support, under Donald Trump’s administration, for Israel’s recent war with Iran. To aid a foreign government’s war of aggression, and then to directly take part in that war, is not to “provide for the common defence…” Aggression is not defense, and waging aggressive war is not part of government’s proper purview. That means, according to America’s founding ideals, U.S. participation in the so-called “Twelve-Day War” was an abuse of power, and the taxation that financed it was an act of what Bastiat called “legal plunder.”
And such direct violations of rights are not justified by hopes and promises that they will indirectly somehow make our rights more secure down the road, as advocates of “preventative” war would have us believe. In any case, such war-making actually tends to make our rights less secure in the future because, by wantonly violating the rights of foreigners, it causes grievances that, as Ron Paul taught us, tend to result in what the CIA calls “blowback.”
What about the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that President Trump recently pushed through Congress and signed into law? It includes tax relief, cuts federal spending on many programs that exceed the proper scope of government, and it might slow the overall growth of government spending. However, it doesn’t reduce legal plunder nearly enough, and it also includes massive new appropriations that are arguably wasteful. Whether the OBBB as a whole aligns with America’s founding principles is not a simple enough question to answer here. In any case, the law should be judged based on those principles, not based on political expediency or presidential endorsement.
In the recent MAGA disputes, it is the Iran doves and the fiscal hawks (whether that includes OBBB supporters or not) who stand for Americanism and thus for America.
“Principle” derives from a Latin word meaning “first thing.” For America to make a genuine comeback, Americans must put first things first: principle before any party, president, or foreign power. “America First” means putting America’s founding principles first, and that is fundamentally at odds with “Israel First,” “Trust in Trump,” and “seize and hold power by any means necessary.”
The more that America betrays its founding ideals, the less it will be great as America. A completely imperial and predatory “America” might be “great” in the sense of size; but such a bloated, voracious, and morbid monstrosity would no longer be America. For what, to paraphrase the Gospel According to Matthew, is a nation profited, if it shall gain the whole world, and lose its own soul?
America can only be great to the extent that it is true to itself. To Make America Great Again, we must restore what Made America Great Before: the nation’s founding philosophy of liberty.
