By attacking equality of citizenship, MAGA is smashing the foundations of nationwide pleasure.
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Revolutionary Warfare reenactors march in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, throughout a Fourth of July parade.(Walter Bibikow / Getty Photos)
Not too way back, the Fourth of July was a festive event: a day of nationwide celebration, sizzling canines and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the normal July 4 vacation in Rabbit at Relaxation (1990), the remaining novel of his Rabbit trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s antihero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former highschool basketball star now in his paunchy and troubled late center age, attire up as Uncle Sam for a parade in his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinly disguised rendition of the real-life Studying). His pretend beard uneasily held on by Scotch tape, Angstrom surveys the American throng gathered in patriotic jubilation:
White-haired girls sit of their aluminum garden chairs down by the curb dressed like fats infants in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Center-aged males have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Younger moms have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided twists of spandex that go away half their buttocks and breasts uncovered.
Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and beset by their very own personal anxieties, but additionally beneficiaries of a rustic that has allowed them in some small strategy to benefit from the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exultant regardless of his bodily diminishment, Angstrom has an epiphany: “Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily—as if he has been lifted as much as survey all human historical past—grows upon him, making his coronary heart thump worse and worse, that each one in all that is the happiest fucking nation the world has ever seen.”
After all, the Jeffersonian dream of liberty has by no means been shared equally and certainly has been actively stolen from many. As in opposition to Updike’s triumphalist good cheer, we even have the bracing rebuke of Frederick Douglass’s basic 1852 oration, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In phrases that may by no means be forgotten, Douglass reminded the world that for the enslaved, the patriotic celebration of liberty and citizenship was worse than meaningless—it was a callous lie paid for by their struggling.
Present Challenge
The abolition of slavery hasn’t ended the sting or relevance of Douglass’s phrases. In 2025, America has a president who’s hell-bent on demolishing the precept of birthright citizenship, one of many nice achievements of Reconstruction that Douglass fought so onerous to enshrine within the 14th Modification.
In Donald Trump’s America, Douglass’s stern critique of patriotic illusions rings more true than Updike’s paean to the “happiest fucking nation the world has ever seen.”
Polls report an more and more pessimistic nationwide temper. In accordance with Gallup, solely 31 p.c of People really feel that the nation is transferring in the appropriate course. Additional, Gallup information that nationwide pleasure is now at a “new low.” Solely 58 p.c of People say they’re extraordinarily proud or very pleased with their nation. (That is down from a excessive of 91 p.c in 2004.) Amongst Democrats, this quantity stands at 38 p.c, amongst independents at 53 p.c. Amongst Gen Z People (born between 1997 and 2012), solely 41 p.c really feel pleasure of their nation.
The darkening nationwide temper in fact goes past Trump’s presidency and might finally be traced to bipartisan failures which have dominated the brand new century, beginning with George W. Bush’s imperial crimes within the international Warfare on Terror and Barack Obama’s insufficient response to the financial meltdown of 2008 (which continues to gasoline financial despair). Because it occurs, Updike’s hometown of Studying completely illustrates the longer arc of nationwide despair. Now a predominantly Latino metropolis, Studying stays a Democratic stronghold that Kamala Harris received with 60 p.c of the vote, however Trump elevated his share of the vote by 16 p.c from 2020 to 2024, which contributed to his victory in Pennsylvania. This 16 level shift was one of many largest swings within the 2024 election. Like many inland American cities, Studying has by no means recovered from deindustrialization and the shift of jobs abroad.
However there isn’t any query that Trump and his Make America Nice Once more motion—though utilizing all of the rhetoric of puffed-up patriotism—has made it tougher for a lot of People to like their very own nation.
The political struggle over immigration reveals how MAGA is a mission to not make America nice however to make it extra grotesque. The hard-won victory of the Civil Warfare made equality of citizenship central to the nation’s id, at the least as a authorized precept if not at all times a lived actuality. Trump is undermining this precept not simply along with his assaults on birthright citizenship however with threats to deport political opponents akin to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Celebration’s nominee for mayor of New York.
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A few of Trump’s followers have gone even additional. On Monday, Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur who can also be a Trump confidant, tweeted:
Alligator lives matter. The excellent news is, alligators are assured at the least 65 million meals if we get began now.
“Alligator” is a reference to the migrant detention heart being inbuilt Florida often known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” There are 65.2 million Latinos in america, the overwhelming majority of whom are residents. Loomer’s publish was nothing lower than a name for the imprisonment and ethnic cleaning of 65 million folks based mostly on their ethnicity. It’s onerous to think about an uglier imaginative and prescient of the nation’s future wanting mass extermination (an idea that’s at the least metaphorically implicit in Loomer’s quip about feeding the alligators). After being criticized for this publish, Loomer disingenuously tried to assert she was solely referring to “unlawful aliens” and never Latinos. The downside with this protection is that there are solely roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in america, whereas there are the truth is 65.2 million Latinos. The intent of her authentic publish is obvious.
Trump’s deportation threats, the assaults on birthright citizenship, and the eliminationist rhetoric utilized by Loomer all add as much as a coherent, if sinister, nationwide imaginative and prescient. The coverage dimensions of this nationwide imaginative and prescient might be seen within the “massive, lovely invoice” that the congressional GOP is working to cross as I write: a funds that ramps up spending on Trump’s deportation machine, cuts taxes for the ultra-wealthy, and deprives almost 12 million People of medical health insurance. MAGA patriotism means dividing the nation into the haves and have-nots. The haves embody the wealthy who will get richer and pro-Trump People (principally white) who will get the safety of citizenship. The have-nots embody those that want authorities help for healthcare and people whom MAGA desires to deprive of citizenship for belonging to the improper ethnicity or having the improper political opinion.
MAGA patriotism means turning America right into a xenophobic, authoritarian dystopia. Whereas I’m not an American, I want America nothing however good (even though Donald Trump additionally desires to extinguish my nation, Canada). For the Fourth of July, I can solely encourage People to heed the teachings of the good crucial patriots—figures starting from Frederick Douglass to Jane Addams to Martin Luther King Jr.—who taught that loving your nation typically means opposing its authorities.
Jeet Lord
Jeet Heer is a nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He additionally pens the month-to-month column “Morbid Signs.” The creator of In Love with Artwork: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Artwork Spiegelman (2013) and Candy Lechery: Evaluations, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for quite a few publications, together with The New Yorker, The Paris Assessment, Virginia Quarterly Assessment, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.
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