MAGA Isn’t About Making America Great
It’s about making it worse for a lot of very particular groups.
I don’t think we need to go over the fact that Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are a bunch of wannabe fascist bigots. This is pretty well established at this point, and the history books won’t look kindly on any of them.
That said, the key idea behind MAGA is making America great again. There is some level of mythical greatness that the right is grasping toward, which America had at one point (usually highlighted as the time period after World War II in the 50s or so).
Here’s the thing. America has never been great for most of the population, at least not until the fairly recent past. Unless you were a straight cis white man, life was never really that good in America until recently, and even then it’s not really been a bed of rose petals.
BIPOC folks face a lot of bigotry and hate from the right in particular, and there was a concerted effort to both prevent the civil rights movement from taking hold and gaining traction. And, when it eventually resulted in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the right has continued to fight that progress, both implicitly (as with gerrymandering) and explicitly via legal efforts.
