Name the Year…

Dissecting “Make America Great Again” — and What the Slogan Costs Us Now

I turn 26 on September 11^th. (For the purpose of this article lets pretend that I turn 26 on September 11^th.

Which means I was one year and one day old when the towers came down. I have never drawn a single breath in an America that was not fighting somewhere. Not one. Twenty-five years, and the only thing that has really changed is the map of where we are shooting.

So when someone tells me they want to make America great again, I have one question, and I want it answered before we go anywhere else.

Name the year.

Not a decade. Not a feeling. Not a photograph of a diner with chrome stools. A year. Give me twelve months on the calendar when this country was great in the way you mean it — when the cruelty was low, the division was low, the racism was low, and the hope was high. Name it, and I will go read everything written that year, and I will come back and tell you honestly what I found.

Nobody ever names the year. That is not an accident. That is the whole design.

The Slogan Has a History, and It Isn’t Trump’s

Start with the phrase itself, because most people arguing about it don’t know where it came from.

Ronald Reagan stood at Liberty State Park on Labor Day 1980 and called for an administration that would “make America great again.” The Smithsonian holds the campaign buttons. Bill Clinton used a version of it in 1992. Donald Trump coined his own wording in November 2012, days after Mitt Romney lost, and trademarked it.

Three men, two parties, forty-six years. The slogan works because it is empty. It is a container you pour your own memory into. Reagan’s voters filled it with the years before stagflation. Trump’s voters fill it with something else. The phrase has never once specified a date, because the moment it does, it can be checked.

The Grocery Cart Argument

Here is where I want to be fair, because my father taught me that you don’t win an argument by pretending the other side has nothing.

The economic nostalgia is not fabricated. A standard candy bar cost five cents through most of the 1960s. A week of groceries ran under twenty dollars. Gas was around thirty-one cents a gallon. Those numbers are real, and the people who remember them are not lying.

But run the comparison honestly and it stops being an argument for going backward.

The federal minimum wage in 1960 was $1.00 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that is roughly $10.95 in today’s money. The federal minimum wage right now is $7.25. A minimum-wage worker in 1960 had more purchasing power per hour than a minimum-wage worker in 2026.

Union membership peaked at 33.5 percent of workers in 1954. In 2025 the Bureau of Labor Statistics put it at 10.0 percent — and 5.9 percent in the private sector. The top marginal income tax rate sat above 90 percent from 1944 through 1963. The very rich rarely paid that headline number; their effective rate ran closer to 42 percent. Still higher than today.

So the shopping cart felt cheaper because working people held more leverage, not because the past held some vanished magic. The cure for that is not nostalgia. The cure is bargaining power and a tax code with a spine. You do not need a time machine. You need a labor movement.

Who Was Actually Invited

And then there is the part the nostalgia leaves out entirely.

Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed more than $120 billion in home mortgages. Ninety-eight percent of that money went to white Americans. In Mississippi in 1947, of 3,229 VA-insured mortgages issued under the GI Bill, exactly two went to Black servicemen. Two. Out of three thousand two hundred and twenty-nine.

That is the engine that built the American middle class. It ran, by design, on exclusion. National homeownership climbed from 44 percent in 1940 to 62 percent by 1960 — and the Black homeownership rate today sits at roughly where it stood sixty years ago.

So when someone tells me the country was great in 1955, what I hear is that it was great for the people who were let in. It was a gated community with a very good marketing department. My father says the trick was never that America hid its cruelty. The trick was that America got extraordinarily good at deciding whose suffering counted as news.

My Father’s Thesis on War

My dad believes wars are manufactured — that contractors, weapons manufacturers, the fossil fuel industry, and the officials who hold positions in all of it profit in the billions, and that the profit is not a side effect of the fighting. It is the point.

He is entitled to that opinion, and I am glad he is. But I went and checked it, because an opinion you haven’t tested is just a mood.

Here is what I can prove and what I can’t.

I cannot prove anyone starts a war to move a stock. Nobody has produced that document, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Defense stocks don’t even move mechanically with conflict — Lockheed Martin and RTX both took losses of 25 and 19 percent from peak to trough during a stretch of 2025 and 2026 when the fighting was intense.

What I can prove is the incentive, and the incentive is not subtle.

In July 2026, Lockheed Martin and RTX told investors they expected strong profits going forward because a wave of global conflicts had drained Pentagon stockpiles that would need replenishing. Lockheed’s backlog hit $230.4 billion, up 38.3 percent in a year. RTX’s reached $289 billion. Both stocks jumped that day — Lockheed 10.6 percent, RTX 7.7 — while the broader S&P 500 fell. The proposed military budget for fiscal 2027 is $1.5 trillion.

That is not a conspiracy theory. That is an earnings call. They said it out loud, to shareholders, under securities law that punishes lying.

On the politicians: my father’s figure was off, so let me correct it in public. Rank-and-file members of Congress make $174,000 a year — not $110,000 — and that number hasn’t moved since 2009. But the real finding is worse than the loose version. Economists studying every congressional stock trade from 1995 to 2021 found that ordinary members do not systematically beat the market. Members who ascend into leadership do. Before they get power, their portfolios look like everyone else’s. After, they don’t.

It isn’t that politicians are good at investing. It’s that proximity to power pays, and it starts paying the moment you arrive.

Dwight Eisenhower saw all of it before any of us were born. He was a five-star general, the man who ran D-Day, and in 1961 he stood in front of the country and warned it to guard against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. Eight years earlier, weeks after Stalin died, he had put it in language nobody has improved on since:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

A Republican general said that. In 1953. If it sounds radical to you now, ask yourself what moved — the statement, or the country.

Iran: The Deal That Worked

My father’s point about nuclear weapons deserves its own section, because the record here is not ambiguous and almost nobody recites it correctly.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed in July 2015. It capped Iran’s uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent — reactor fuel grade — limited the stockpile to 300 kilograms, and installed the most intrusive inspection regime ever attached to a nuclear program.

Then everyone watched it work.

The International Atomic Energy Agency issued more than a dozen compliance reports between 2016 and 2018 and found no substantive violations. In April 2018 the State Department’s own report said Iran was transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement. General Joseph Dunford, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in September 2017 that Iran was adhering to its obligations. Trump himself certified Iranian compliance to Congress twice before deciding it wasn’t true.

In May 2018, the United States withdrew anyway.

Here is the arithmetic of that decision. In June 2018 — a month after the withdrawal, while Iran was still complying — the stockpile stood at 123.9 kilograms against a 300-kilogram ceiling. By June 2025 the IAEA assessed the stockpile at roughly 21,800 pounds. Nearly ninety times larger.

Then came a twelve-day war in June 2025. Then, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched close to 900 strikes in twelve hours. The opening wave killed Iran’s Supreme Leader. It also killed about 170 people when a missile struck a girls’ school next to a naval base near Bandar Abbas.

A girls’ school.

We had an inspection regime. We traded it for a war, and then for a second war, and the schoolgirls at Minab paid the bill for a decision made in Washington eight years before they died.

The Word People Don’t Want to Say

My father and I do not agree on everything, but we agree on this: you don’t get to call yourself a moral country and then look away from Gaza because the vocabulary is uncomfortable.

Let me be precise about what has been determined and by whom, because precision is what makes this survivable as an argument.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that there were reasonable grounds to find Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, identifying four of the five prohibited acts under the 1948 Genocide Convention. In June 2026 the Commission issued a second report finding that Palestinian children had been deliberately targeted, and that roughly 30 percent of everyone killed since October 2023 has been a child. The death toll has passed 70,000. UNICEF counts more than 50,000 children killed or wounded.

At the International Court of Justice, South Africa’s case is live. The Court has issued three binding provisional measures orders and found that Palestinians’ right to be protected from genocide is plausible and at real and imminent risk. It has not issued a final ruling on the merits. Israel filed its counter-memorial in March 2026, rejects the charge entirely, and has challenged the Court’s jurisdiction. Under the current schedule the case runs into 2029.

So: a UN commission has made the finding. The world’s highest court has not yet ruled, and Israel denies all of it. Both of those things are true, and anyone who tells you only one of them is selling you something.

None of that legal machinery changes what the photographs show.

The Argument I Had to Correct

I was going to tell you about a Palestinian girl who was going to invent a handheld device to turn seawater into drinking water, and who was killed before she could.

I went looking for her. I could not find her. No news archive, no human rights report, no name, no record. I believe whoever told me that story believed it. But I am not going to build a moral argument on a person I cannot prove existed, because if I do, that paragraph becomes the excuse to throw away everything else on this page.

So let me give you the real ones instead. They are worse.

Sufyan Tayeh was born in the Jabalia refugee camp. He went to an UNRWA school, earned his physics degree from the Islamic University of Gaza in 1994, and worked his way to becoming that university’s president. Elsevier and Stanford ranked him in the top two percent of researchers worldwide. In March 2023 he was named UNESCO Chair in Physics, Astrophysics and Space Sciences. His research included dye-sensitized solar cells and optical sensing — the exact class of work that produces things like better water systems.

On December 2, 2023, an airstrike killed him and his entire family.

Refaat Alareer taught literature at the same university and founded We Are Not Numbers, which paired young writers in Gaza with established authors. He was killed on December 6, 2023, along with his brother, his sister, and four of his nephews.

Said Alzebda, an electrical engineer trained at Nottingham and president of the University College of Applied Sciences, was killed with his wife and children on December 31, 2023.

In the first six months alone, UN experts documented more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers, and 95 university professors killed. Over 80 percent of schools damaged or destroyed. Every university in Gaza City in ruins. The Central Archives, holding 150 years of history, gone. There is a word for this — scholasticide, coined by the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi — and the United Nations has now used it.

And here is the part that undoes me. The inventor I was told about does exist. She is just not who I was told.

Inas al-Ghul is an agricultural engineer, fifty years old, in Khan Yunis. With wood salvaged from aid pallets and window panes pulled from abandoned buildings, she built a glass-covered trough that uses nothing but sunlight to evaporate seawater into drinkable water. No electricity. No filters. No solar panels. Displaced families relied on it for months.

I don’t need a martyred child to make this argument. There is a woman alive right now, in the rubble, solving a problem that half the coastal world will face this century, with pallet wood and broken windows. That is what we are aiming munitions at.

Every person killed carries out something that cannot be recovered. Not because their potential was more valuable than their life — life is the point, full stop — but because the loss compounds. We are burning the exact human capacity we are going to need.

What “Great” Would Actually Require

Because here is the arithmetic nobody running for office wants on a podium.

At the end of 2025, 82.2 million people were living in internal displacement. Conflict and violence drove 32.3 million new displacements that year — the highest ever recorded, up 60 percent in twelve months, the first time on record that conflict has outpaced disasters. Disasters still forced 29.9 million more. In 2024, weather-related events triggered 99.5 percent of all disaster displacement, and the United States alone accounted for nearly a quarter of the global total.

The years 2023 through 2025 were the first three-year period in recorded history to average more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The past eleven years are the eleven warmest ever measured.

At home: 745,652 people were homeless on a single night in January 2025. Chronic homelessness hit 155,750, the highest ever recorded — roughly double the 2016 figure. Twenty-eight states got worse.

That is the actual condition of the world, and there is no year in American history we can return to that solves any of it. Not 1955. Not 1985. Not 2015. The Climate and Ecological Emergency does not care which decade you feel homesick for. The refugee crisis will not be negotiated down by nostalgia.

So, No

It is not about making America great again.

It is about becoming a better and more compassionate version of ourselves — every single one of us, individually, on purpose, starting now. Not restored. Improved. Past a version of this country that has never actually existed.

That means adaptive resiliency: preparing honestly, cooperating deliberately, refusing the comfort of a past that was only comfortable for some. It means treating every human life as the irreplaceable and unrepeatable thing it is, including the ones on the other side of a border, a wall, or a headline. Even identical twins are not copies of each other. There has never been another one of you, and when you are gone, the specific thing you would have contributed goes with you.

My father is 25 years older than the argument I just made, and he was right about the shape of it before I could read. Whether he is right about every mechanism, I don’t know. Neither does he. But he taught me the only rule that matters here: check it, then say it anyway.

I checked it.

Name the year. I’ll wait.

Que Humanidad / Compiled & Mr. Alvarez’s Thoughts | AI Enhanced.

A note on method: I use artificial intelligence to enhance my creativity and thinking — for research, fact-checking, and sharpening arguments. The convictions are mine. So are any errors that survived the checking. AI is a tool for becoming more rigorous, never a substitute for having something to say.

Sources

The slogan: Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Reagan-Bush 1980 campaign button (1980.0691.04); Reagan, Labor Day Speech at Liberty State Park, September 1, 1980, Reagan Library; Britannica, “MAGA movement.”

Prices and wages: Federal minimum wage history, U.S. Department of Labor; historical candy and grocery price surveys; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members — 2025” (USDL-26-0229, February 18, 2026); Congressional Research Service, “A Brief Examination of Union Membership Data” (R47596); Tax Foundation and Tax Notes on 1950s marginal versus effective rates.

Housing and the GI Bill: Congressional testimony on FHA lending, 1934–1962 (House Financial Services, March 20, 2024); New America, “Racial Wealth Disparities and the PLUS Loan ‘Fix’”; Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity, “Race and Housing Series: the GI Bill”; NBER Working Paper 29244 on redlining.

Defense industry: Reuters, “Lockheed Martin, RTX lift 2026 forecasts as Pentagon looks to restock weapons,” July 23, 2026; company Q2 2026 earnings releases; CEPR, “Political power and profitable trades in the US Congress,” December 2025; Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” April 16, 1953, and Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 (both public domain).

Iran: IAEA quarterly compliance reports, 2016–2018; U.S. State Department JCPOA report, April 2018; testimony of Gen. Joseph Dunford, September 2017; FactCheck.org, March 2026; Arms Control Association, “The Iran Deal, Then and Now”; House of Commons Library, “Israel/US-Iran conflict 2026”; Britannica, “2026 Iran war.”

Gaza: UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the OPT, September 2025 (A/HRC/60/CRP.3) and June 23, 2026 reports; UN News, June 23, 2026; ICJ, South Africa v. Israel, provisional measures orders and Order of 21 May 2026; Israel’s Counter-Memorial, March 12, 2026; OHCHR, “UN experts deeply concerned over ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza,” April 18, 2024; Times Higher Education and Birzeit University on Sufyan Tayeh; AFP / Al-Monitor on Inas al-Ghul, August 2024.

Displacement and climate: IDMC/NRC, Global Report on Internal Displacement 2025 and 2026; WMO, State of the Global Climate 2025; Copernicus Climate Change Service, January 2026; Berkeley Earth Global Temperature Report for 2025.

Homelessness: HUD, 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, Part 1 (Point-in-Time Estimates); Bipartisan Policy Center and Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies analyses.