Making America Great Again, But What Greatness Are We Talking About?
“Make America Great Again.” Four magic words that get millions of Americans fired up. So, giving America back its greatness, why not? But before we go any further, one innocent little question: which era exactly are these nostalgic types talking about when they bring up past greatness? Because you see, depending on whether you’re privileged or just a regular citizen, what “American greatness” looks like changes a whole lot.
For the ultra-rich, sure, America has ALWAYS been great. Back then you had Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford… And right now Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg… All those names stand for colossal fortunes built on… well, hang on a second, we’ll get there! America is probably even greater for today’s billionaires than it has ever been. Record inequality, legalized tax dodging and total political clout. These people are in heaven.
But for the middle and working class? That’s a whole different story! A story Hollywood movies don’t tell, and neither do politicians’ speeches. A story of violence, exploitation, state lies and blood. A lot of blood and sweat.
So let’s take a few minutes to think this through. We’re going on a little trip back through this supposedly glorious America. That way we’ll see together what that famous “greatness” everybody talks about actually looked like.
Bloody foundations: when greatness spells mass slaughter
Let’s start at the beginning. America was built on a genocide. That’s not a metaphor and it’s not an exaggeration: genocide is the word. It’s an established fact that Native populations, estimated at 5 to 15 million human beings before Europeans showed up, were wiped out through massacres, diseases spread on purpose and forced removals.
And since killing the people wasn’t enough, their way of life had to go too. Take the buffalo. Sixty million animals slaughtered between 1830 and 1890! Not to eat them, just to starve out the Plains tribes. Genocide by famine, methodically organized. That’s how you lay the foundations of a nation “blessed by God.”
But the real economic pillar of that budding greatness was slavery. Four million people turned into merchandise. Colossal fortunes built on their backs. Southern cotton made Northern bankers rich. The plantations built dynasties. America was rising on corpses, whip marks and chains.
Meanwhile, were white workers doing any better? Were they living in some kind of proletarian paradise? Let me doubt that. A worker’s life expectancy ran 10 to 20 years shorter than a bourgeois man’s. Kids started working at 6 or 8. Twelve to fifteen hours a day, six days a week. And vacation? A completely unknown concept.
Wages? Calculated down to the bone, just enough to cover the basics. 85% of a working family’s budget went to rent and food. Saving anything was unthinkable. Getting sick was a death sentence, because no social safety net existed before 1880. Workplace accidents were common, often fatal and never compensated.
In 1878, the British Association found that working-class boys aged 11 and 12 stood 12 centimeters (about 5 inches) shorter than boys from the bourgeoisie. Twelve centimeters! That’s what American “greatness” produced back then: stunted bodies, broken lives and institutionalized misery.
The Civil War: the poor die, the rich get richer
Then came the Civil War. The official story tells you it was a noble war to abolish slavery. In reality it was a fight between a slaveholding Southern far right and liberal Northern capitalists. Two economic models going at each other, two elites fighting over who ran the country.
And who died in that civil war? Mostly the poor. On both sides, hundreds of thousands of young men were cut down in their prime. While rich Northerners got richer selling weapons, uniforms and food to the armies. Ah, war, what a great profit accelerator!
The Wild West and the golden age of raw capitalism: violence as a model
After the war came the era people call, with a straight face, the “Gilded Age.” Gilded for who exactly? For robber barons like Rockefeller in oil, Carnegie in steel and Morgan in finance. Those three sat on a concentration of wealth and power that was flat-out obscene.
Between 1897 and 1904, 1,800 companies got folded into just 157. A dizzying concentration that controlled transport, food processing, timber, paper, insurance… Free market, or Soviet-style monopoly? I’d call it crony capitalism, honestly.
It’s also the era of the Wild West. The stretch America loves to fantasize about in its westerns. The violence, the greed, the lone cowboys. A myth that still sells today. The real Wild West was massacres, stolen land and brutality beyond words. Anyway, might makes right, turned into a founding principle.
Because while the robber barons piled up money, workers lived in vile conditions. In 1880, more than a million kids under 15 worked every single day. Kids who’d never see a classroom and never get a childhood.
For adults, sixty hours a week minimum. In 1900, steelworkers put in twelve-hour days for wages that the records of the time describe, and I quote, as “way below the minimum needed to live decently.” Still no health insurance, no unemployment, no pension. You worked until your body gave out. That was the social contract of great America.
Ultra-violent repression: when the state slaughters its own workers
Obviously, workers tried to fight back. To organize. To build unions. And obviously, the answer was staggering violence. Take 1877, when the railroad workers walked out. More than 100,000 people stopped working. The crackdown was savage. A hundred dead and a thousand thrown in jail. That’s how great America treated anyone who dared ask for better conditions.
But the main attraction, the thing that sums up the era, is the Pinkertons. A private security agency, or rather a bosses’ militia that infiltrated unions and broke strikes by the most brutal means available. Jay Gould, a cynical and ruthless tycoon, openly bragged he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
On May 1, 1886, a massive strike went up across the country for the eight-hour day. Four hundred thousand workers walked off. Three days later, in Chicago, a striker died during a police charge. The next day, at a protest in Haymarket Square, a bomb went off. The police fired into the crowd. The tally: dozens dead and wounded. Plus eight anarchists handed heavy sentences, four of them hanged to make a point.
1892, Homestead, Pennsylvania. Three thousand workers strike at the Carnegie steel mills. The company president, Henry Frick, brings in three hundred armed Pinkertons. On the night of July 5 into July 6, it turns into a thirteen-hour battle between strikers and Pinkertons. Official count: sixteen dead (seven Pinkertons and nine strikers) and more than sixty wounded. The furious crowd beats the captured Pinkertons bloody. Women, men, children, all of them united in rage against those mercenaries of capital.
1894, the Pullman strike in Chicago. The city is paralyzed. Democratic president Grover Cleveland declares the strike illegal and sends in federal troops. Violent fighting breaks out. Thirteen workers dead. The strike is broken and Eugene Debs, the union president, gets six months in prison. He’d go on to become one of the faces of American socialism.
1914, the Ludlow massacre in Colorado. Striking miners set up a camp with their families. The National Guard attacks. At nightfall, they torch the camp and shoot the people running out. Twenty-six murdered, including eleven children and two women. That class war ends up killing seventy-four people, all because they’d asked for better working conditions. That’s American greatness in action.
The 1920s: America’s heavy flirtation with fascism
The Roaring Twenties… Roaring for who? For the ultra-rich playing the stock market, no doubt. For workers it was more like the leaden years.
1919: four million strikers nationwide. The government’s answer? A hysterical anti-communist campaign. Attorney General Palmer and his young protégé, a guy named Edgar Hoover, arrest ten thousand people in six weeks. Thirty-five hundred activists are held for months. Five hundred and fifty-six get deported.
In 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, are executed in the electric chair after seven years of legal fighting. Their crime? Just being anarchists and immigrants. The proof of their guilt? Nonexistent or fabricated. Didn’t matter. One more piece of evidence that the so-called land of the free doesn’t tolerate dissent.
But the juiciest part, the most telling thing about the era, is Henry Ford. Yes, the industrial genius, the man who invented the assembly line and put a car in every driveway. An American hero, right? Well, that hero was also a gut-level antisemite and a Nazi sympathizer. In 1918, Ford buys the Dearborn Independent and turns it into an antisemitic soapbox. For eight years, from 1920 to 1927, he runs hateful screeds in it. Including the vile Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The paper goes out through every Ford dealership and reaches seven hundred thousand readers. One of them: a guy named Adolf Hitler.
Because yes, Hitler admired Ford. He even kept a portrait of him in his private office. He called him “Heinrich Ford” and saw him as the leader of the fascist movement picking up steam in America. In 1938, for his 75th birthday, Hitler gives Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest Nazi honor for foreigners. Ford takes it. Without blinking.
Better yet: Ford funds the Nazi party starting in the early 1930s. Fifty thousand dollars every year, for Hitler’s birthday. And during World War II, his German subsidiaries build vehicles for the Wehrmacht. Ford supplies both sides. Because business is business, right?
A Nazi party existed in the United States. The American government dragged its feet about going to war against Hitler. Because frankly, fascism didn’t bother them all that much. What bothered them was losing money.
The Great Depression: guess who picks up the tab
1929: the crash. The economy collapses. Millions unemployed, families on the street and endless lines for a bowl of soup. And who picks up the tab for the delirious speculation of the Roaring Twenties? The poor, again! The middle class watches its savings evaporate. Workers lose their jobs. And the bankers who caused the disaster? Bailed out. Like always! Because it’s an unbreakable law of American capitalism: profits are private, losses are socialized. In other words, when things go well they stuff their pockets, and when things go bad the taxpayer coughs it up.
The “glorious” fifties: the Happy Days myth
After World War II come the 1950s. The so-called American golden age. Tract-house suburbs, a car in every garage and a TV in every living room. The American dream made flesh. But were those really “Happy Days”?
Because for African Americans it was more like the nightmare years, with the Jim Crow laws, on the books since 1877, running full blast. “Separate but equal,” said the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, without a hint of shame. Separate but equal. What a barefaced lie! What a disgrace for a supposedly civilized country!
Separate bathrooms, separate water fountains, separate buses, separate schools, separate restaurants… People of color couldn’t sit next to white people at the movies, couldn’t marry white people… And above all, they couldn’t vote! In Louisiana, in 1910, fewer than 0.5% of Black men had the right to vote. That’s 730 men out of the entire Black population of the state.
The Ku Klux Klan? Thriving! In 1925, thirty thousand members marched in broad daylight through Washington with no hoods on, proud of their hate. Lynchings? Routine! In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old, is tortured and murdered in Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman. His killers are acquitted. Obviously!
So it was paradise for white people then? Not really! Mostly it was suffocating conformity. The suburb as a gilded cage. The man in the suit and tie, commute-work-sleep, drowning himself in booze to put up with a life that made him an interchangeable cog in the capitalist machine.
And women? Ah, women! Locked into the role of housewife, perfect mother and smiling spouse. Not allowed a bank account without their husband’s permission. Domestic violence was more than tolerated. And marital rape? Legally the concept didn’t exist, because you can’t rape your own wife. Yeah, sure!
So to stand this mandatory happiness, women took drugs. There’s even a Rolling Stones song that calls them “mother’s little helpers.” Anti-anxiety pills, antidepressants… A whole generation of women on tranquilizers. Because for a lot of them, the American dream looked an awful lot like a nightmare they couldn’t wake up from.
And meanwhile, the McCarthy witch hunt was going full tilt. Big anti-communist paranoia. Lives destroyed on a single accusation. Careers wrecked, families torn apart. All because Senator McCarthy saw communists everywhere. So Hollywood got purged, universities got watched and unions got infiltrated.
Not to mention the nuclear terror. Those ridiculous school drills teaching kids to hide under their desks in case of an atomic attack. As if a wooden desk was going to protect them from a thermonuclear bomb. But hey, you had to do something about the existential dread of a generation raised on fear of nuclear apocalypse.
Oh yeah, almost forgot. It’s also the era where overconsumption becomes therapy. You’re not happy? Buy stuff! You feel empty? Buy stuff! Your life has no meaning? Buy stuff! Anyway, shopping as an antidepressant and buying yourself sick as a reason to live. Every foundation of modern American society was laid right there.
The sixties and seventies: the golden age? My ass!
The 1960s. America puts men on the Moon. Amazing! Meanwhile it also sends hundreds of thousands of poor young men to die in Vietnam.
On March 16, 1968, in the hamlet of My Lai, Vietnam, American soldiers slaughter somewhere between 347 and 504 civilians depending on the estimate. Women, children and babies killed in horrific conditions. Gang rapes, mutilations. Entire families wiped out. Villagers raising their hands in surrender get shot anyway. The wounded get finished off with bayonets. And the sinister General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces in Vietnam, congratulates Charlie Company for “an outstanding action” and for having “dealt the enemy a heavy blow.” No comment.
Who was held responsible? Out of 26 soldiers charged at first, exactly one gets convicted: Lieutenant William Calley. For twenty-two murders he gets life in prison. Which he serves in… three and a half years. Under house arrest… Three and a half years for running a massacre! And My Lai was in no way an isolated incident. In Quang Ngai province, where the massacre happened, up to 70% of all villages were destroyed by air and artillery bombardment. Napalm and Agent Orange on the menu. Vietnam was a laboratory for every atrocity going.
A Pentagon investigation turned up 320 potential war crimes between 1967 and 1971, including seven massacres that killed at least a hundred and thirty-seven civilians. Seventy-eight other attacks targeting noncombatants. A hundred and forty-one cases of torture of civilians or prisoners of war. Out of the 203 servicemen charged, only twenty-three were convicted. And all those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg.
Because you see, the American military had an unofficial doctrine called the “Mere Gook Rule”: soldiers wouldn’t be prosecuted for killing or wounding Vietnamese civilians. So they had a blank check to slaughter innocent people. And the body count was the measure of success. Who you killed didn’t matter, as long as the numbers looked good.
Thousands of poor young Americans died over there. Not rich men’s sons, no! Those had exemptions: college, conveniently timed medical problems, connections… So it was mostly working-class kids who came home in body bags. Or came home scarred for life, hooked on heroin and unable to fit back into a society that had shipped them off to be butchered.
But for the others, the ones who stayed home, it must have been the golden age, right? With that prosperous postwar-boom America, you’d think you could at least touch a piece of paradise? Let’s look at what actually happened. Inflation ate into buying power. One economic crisis after another. In 1973 came the oil shock. Then stagflation, which brought unemployment and inflation together. An explosive cocktail that wiped out millions of families’ savings.
And women? Still in deep shit! Until 1974 they couldn’t get a credit card without a man cosigning. Marital rape was legal in most states until the 1970s and 80s. Wages ran 40% to 60% below men’s for the same work. Abortion was flat-out illegal until 1973. So thousands of women died every year from back-alley abortions. But hey, those were the glory years. Right?
Social violence was everywhere. Political assassinations kept coming: JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1968 and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Four years, four major assassinations! The country was on the edge of imploding. And let’s talk about the urban riots too, Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967 and Detroit in 1967. Whole cities on fire. The National Guard in the streets. Dozens dead. The American dream… nightmare edition.
And the environment? Nobody gave a shit. Rivers literally caught fire. In Cleveland the Cuyahoga River burned several times, including once in 1969 that finally woke people up. The air in big cities was unbreathable. Toxic spills ran into the thousands. And I’m leaving out plenty, a lot of it worse.
That’s the reality of the glory years. That’s the American golden age! State lies, massacres, assassinations, pollution, inflation, unemployment and endemic violence. So every time somebody says “glorious,” I have to wonder if they made a serious mistake picking that word.
The eighties: Reagan’s unleashed capitalism
The 1980s bring Ronald Reagan and the triumph of neoliberalism. Unions get destroyed. Reagan breaks the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981. The signal is clear: capitalism doesn’t need to pretend to negotiate anymore. So inequality explodes! The rich get immensely rich. The poor get poorer. And the middle class starts to crack. But what matters, apparently, is that the economy “trickles down.” Except nothing ever trickled down, only up, where the money has always flowed freely.
It’s also when crack shows up, along with the endless war on drugs. A war that was really a war on the poor and on African Americans. The CIA itself was mixed up in cocaine trafficking to fund its illegal operations in Central America. So crack floods the ghettos. Tens of thousands of young minority men get locked up. Thousands of lives destroyed. I still don’t see the greatness. Maybe it shows up later?
The nineties and 2000s: the age of state lies
1991, the first Iraq war. Built on lies. The story about the incubators in Kuwait? Made up from scratch. Forty-five thousand civilian casualties! But hey, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, so it’s fine. Goes down smooth.
2001: September 11. Three thousand dead. Tragic, horrible, inexcusable. The American response? Crank out laws that gut its own people’s freedoms. Invade Afghanistan. Then, in 2003, Iraq again. On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell stands up in front of the UN Security Council. He waves around a vial of white powder. Proof, he says, that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He shows satellite photos, audio recordings…
Except it was all false. Every bit of it! The Center for Public Integrity would go on to count 935 lies in the public statements of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell and Rumsfeld. 935 deliberate lies to justify a war whose unstated goal was getting hold of oil. Paul Wolfowitz, the number two at the Pentagon, admitted later: “we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Translation: we were looking for a pretext, any pretext.
Hans Blix, the UN inspector, kept saying there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Whatever! The United States went to war anyway. Result: hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. A country destroyed. Chaos across the Middle East. And the birth of ISIS! Congratulations on that fiasco, admirers of American greatness.
And the people behind those lies? Not one of them was punished. Not one! They wrote books, gave speeches and collected millions. Powell died respected in 2021. Bush paints pictures in Texas. Cheney lives quietly. Rumsfeld died peacefully in 2021. What a disgrace!
Afghanistan? Twenty years of war. To end up exactly where it started. The Taliban back in power once America left with its tail between its legs. Twenty-four hundred American soldiers dead. A hundred and fifty thousand Afghans killed. Trillions of dollars spent. For nothing. Absolutely nothing.
But the main event is 2007-2008 and the subprime crisis. The banks lent money to people who could never pay it back. Then they turned those rotten loans into “safe” financial products. Then they sold that toxic garbage to the whole world. Fraud on a planetary scale. And when it all collapsed, millions of people lost their homes. Their savings. Their retirement. Lives destroyed. And the bankers responsible? Bailed out with public money! Seven hundred billion dollars. Not one bank CEO in prison. Not one.
Worse! Those same bankers paid themselves bonuses out of the bailout money. Because you know, they had to “retain talent.” The same talent that had nearly torched the world economy. Makes perfect sense.
The 2010s and 2020s: welcome to Idiocracy
Inequality hits historic records. Three billionaires own as much as 50% of the American population. Public schools are in ruins. Forty million Americans have no health coverage. Student debt is crushing an entire generation. The infrastructure is literally falling apart. Racism and violence are as vicious as ever. Anyway, more than ever, America is putting on a show of every symptom of its own decline.
But apparently everything’s fine. The Dow is up. The rich have never been richer. The system works. For them. Only for them. Like always, greatness only ever follows the privileged. And tough luck for everybody else, the other 99% who can always take shelter in historical myths to keep telling themselves tomorrow will be better.
Best actor, Uncle Sam category: the CIA and the FBI, for lifetime achievement
Let’s start with the Central Intelligence Agency. America’s pride. The agency that defends democracy all over the world. So they say. Because the reality looks more like a state inside the state. A criminal organization with an unlimited budget and total immunity.
So what do we make of MKUltra, a program launched in the 1950s to develop mind control techniques by dosing people with LSD? Without their consent, naturally. The guinea pigs? Soldiers, prisoners, but also ordinary American civilians.
Frank Olson, a biologist working for the Army, was dosed with LSD by his boss in 1953. Ten days later, he fell from a ten-story building in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Decades later, his body was exhumed and showed he was under the influence of LSD when he died.
George White, a federal narcotics agent, rents apartments for the CIA. “Safe houses” where prostitutes lure in unsuspecting clients. They get dosed with LSD, their behavior gets watched through two-way mirrors and everything gets recorded. That’s Operation Midnight Climax. Paid for by American taxpayers.
In Lexington, in a facility supposedly built to treat people, volunteers get recruited among addicts. They’re kept on LSD for seventy-seven days. A hundred and forty micrograms a day. Their pay? Doses of heroin!
Thousands of Americans were used as lab rats. How many exactly? We’ll probably never know. Because in 1973, CIA director Richard Helms and MKUltra mastermind Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the documents to cover up their crimes. And MKUltra is only the visible tip of the iceberg. The CIA’s budget? Secret. Its funding sources? Opaque. Democratic oversight? Basically nonexistent.
And abroad it’s even worse! Coups, overthrowing elected governments and installing dictators. Pinochet in Chile. The Shah in Iran. Mobutu in Zaire. The list is long… Very long. Torture, kidnappings, black sites all over the world. Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib. Hundreds of prisoners tortured, locked up for years with no trial and no lawyer. Some of them innocent. But who cares. It’s for national security, supposedly.
And let’s not forget the drug trade. Because yes, back to that: the CIA funded its illegal operations by selling drugs. The Iran-Contra scandal. Crack in American ghettos. All of it to bankroll death squads in Central America.
As for the FBI, it’s hardly better. J. Edgar Hoover ran the agency for forty-eight years, from 1924 to 1972. Forty-eight years of building blackmail files on every politician in the country. Spying, harassing and wrecking lives. Not to mention the COINTELPRO program, which targeted civil rights activists, pacifists and union organizers. Ten thousand files on American citizens came to light in 1975. How many are there today? Mystery! The FBI systematically infiltrates political organizations. It even sent anonymous letters to Martin Luther King pushing him to kill himself. It also murdered Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader, in 1969. That’s right! State murders committed on American soil.
That’s the real American deep state. It isn’t one more conspiracy theory. It’s documented, admitted and even owned. Because in the end, nobody got punished. And nobody ever will. So don’t bother looking for reptilians or Illuminati. The conspiracy is right there. Right in front of us.
Artificial paradise: when American happiness runs on chemicals
Let’s talk about a fascinating paradox. If America really is the greatest country in the world, if it’s really heaven on Earth, then why do its people need to get high this much?
The 1950s and 60s see anti-anxiety pills and antidepressants explode. Millions of Americans, women above all, are on tranquilizers. To put up with mandatory happiness, required perfection and the obligatory smile.
The 1970s and 80s: cocaine floods Wall Street. The “masters of the universe” have to get wired to keep up. Because capitalist paradise apparently needs white powder up your nose to be bearable. Meanwhile, crack wrecks the ghettos. Two sets of rules. Cocaine for the rich and crack for the poor. And the prison sentences? A hundred times heavier for crack. Pure coincidence?
The 1990s and 2000s mark the start of the opioid crisis. Orchestrated by Big Pharma, with Purdue Pharma and its OxyContin. Mass legal addiction, because doctors hand these pills out like candy. And patients get hooked by the million. And Purdue Pharma knew! The internal documents prove it. They knew their drug was massively addictive. And they hid it on purpose. They lied. They bought off doctors. To sell more. Always more. And make more profit. Result: since 1999, more than five hundred thousand Americans have died of opioid overdoses. Five hundred thousand! A city the size of Atlanta wiped clean off the map.
Did anybody get punished? Purdue Pharma went bankrupt in 2019. The Sackler family that owns it agreed to pay six billion dollars in exchange for immunity. Six billion sounds like a lot. Except they made thirty-five. So whatever people say, crime seems to pay pretty well.
Today, fentanyl is the killer. Whole regions are getting torn apart by that shit. Mostly in the America nobody looks at. The one big-city people sneer at. That drug is destroying communities. Breaking families. Losing an entire generation.
Life expectancy in the United States? It’s going down! The only developed country where that’s happening. Three straight years of decline between 2015 and 2017. Mostly from overdoses and suicides. Deaths of despair, as the economists call them. So let’s ask the question: why? Why does the richest country in the world need to get high like this? Why do its people have to numb themselves to put up with their own lives?
Because sorry, when you’re happy you don’t need hard drugs. When your life means something, you don’t need coke up your nose to feel effective. When your existence is fulfilling, you don’t need Xanax to sleep. So here’s the answer: the American dream is such a nightmare that you have to knock yourself out to live it. That’s the truth. A truth nobody wants to look at.
The American dream: the biggest ad campaign in history
So how did America manage to sell this nightmare as a dream? Simple: with its entertainment industry, the most effective propaganda machine ever built. John Wayne as the lone, virile cowboy. Elvis the tamed rebel. Marilyn Monroe, the tragic beauty. Manufactured, marketed icons, sold to the whole world as a dream. With the hamburger as a symbol of freedom. Big cars as proof you’d made it. The house with a yard as the highest horizon a person could reach, and consumer society held up as a model of civilization.
And it worked! For decades, the whole world swallowed the big American Dream myth. The self-made man. The land of opportunity. Anybody can become a millionaire. All it takes is hard work. Except it’s false! Because social mobility in the United States is lower than in most European countries. Proof: if you’re born poor in America, odds are good you’ll die poor. The American dream? Just a big lottery with a lot of players and very, very few winners.
The culture industry, Hollywood first among them, has never spared any effort selling the myth through movies, shows and music. Easy-to-swallow entertainment that paints a world where everyone’s beautiful, everyone’s cool and everyone’s rich. All of it a manipulation on a planetary scale, with colossal resources for pushing its codes onto everybody else. And it’s done so well that even Americans started believing they were superheroes. That they saved the world. That they always stood for Good against Evil. But the world woke up. American imperialism got its mask pulled off. The arrogance became unbearable. Too many lies, too much disrespect piled up… The varnish finally cracked. With the makeup off, America isn’t sexy at all.
The American model is so rotten that even the Iraqis and the Afghans didn’t want it. After years of occupation and billions of dollars spent on “reconstruction,” those countries rejected the model being forced on them. Because deep down, America deciding its values are all the right ones doesn’t make it true. Because America has a way of imposing its values that turns everybody off. Because America wants to impose its culture by destroying everyone else’s. Because in the end, America doesn’t offer, it doesn’t trade… No, it crushes everything, no compromise!
American soft power? Just a bad joke. America has never done soft power. It’s always been ultra-violent and ultra-selfish. Its word means nothing. It keeps no promises. It acts for its own interests only. Never to save the world, never to defend democracy. Always out of opportunism. End of story.
So America in the 2020s, like it or not, is the face of its orange-tinted president. Arrogant, selfish, paranoid, violent, vulgar, self-centered, narcissistic, sexist. That’s the image of Americans in the world today. Not Hollywood’s. Not the one in political speeches. The real one. The one it can’t hide anymore.
Conclusion
So “Make America Great Again”? Which greatness are we talking about exactly? The Rockefellers’ and the Bezoses’, getting rich off the backs of millions of exploited workers? The wars built on state lies that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians? The workers putting in twelve-hour days with no safety net who died twenty years before the rich did? The eight-year-olds working in mines instead of going to school? The strikers massacred by private militias paid for by the bosses? The African Americans lynched, segregated and stripped of their rights for a century after slavery was abolished? The women drugged on tranquilizers to stand their gilded cage? The CIA drugging, torturing, assassinating, toppling governments and installing dictators? A country drowning in hard drugs because its people need to numb themselves to get through their own lives? Seriously, which greatness are we talking about? Unless I misunderstood the question.
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