However historians judge Donald Trump after he leaves the White House, we will have to give him credit for turning a slogan of eight syllables into both the guiding purpose of his campaigns and the movement that twice helped elect him president. “Make America Great Again” manages to evoke a better, if shrewdly unspecific, past as well as the longing for a powerful nation whose government does exceptionally good things for its citizens. All that, and it fits neatly on a baseball cap.

Most progressives, historians or not, cringe at the slogan and believe it captures something vital and malevolent that drives Trump’s words and policies. MAGA allegedly looks kindly on the routine brutalities of the Jim Crow era and a time when women had to defer to men and queer folks had to keep the closet door tightly shut. Yet, I still believe it’s critical to take the longing behind Trump’s master slogan to heart. Liberals and leftists know the nation is in serious trouble—racked by bitter cultural and partisan divisions, widespread fears about the future of jobs in an AI-driven economy, and a despotic leader who grants no legitimacy to his opponents. In this environment, the desire for better times should not be condemned as just a bigoted yearning to return to an era when straight white men ran everything.

Historians can wade into the debate by explaining what “greatness” has meant in the American past and might mean again. To do so would demonstrate empathy for our fellow citizens to whom the slogan appeals, even if we disagree with Trump’s policies and dislike his egomaniacal behavior. It’s also a quintessential task of historians to make a serious attempt to grapple with the power of a key concept in the nation’s past.

I doubt Trump, for all his bluster, could offer a coherent response if anyone asked him, “So when was America great and what made it that way?” After all, the MAGA chieftain plans to spend $34 million on a National Garden of American Heroes stuffed with classical statues of what he calls “our greatest Americans to ever live.” The list includes the baseball pitcher Cy Young, Alex Trebek—the Canadian-born host of Jeopardy!—and Christopher Columbus, who never set foot on any piece of land that would become the United States three centuries later.

One might begin a serious examination of greatness by distinguishing between its meaning as material power—economic and military—and as the desire to make America a society that will live up to ideals most citizens have long said they care about: social equality, individual liberty, and a robust democracy. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln spoke of the “great” war being waged and the “great battlefield” on which he was speaking. But he ended with a call to take up “the great task remaining before us”—to make sure “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Through much of our history, reformers and radicals made harsh critiques of material power while embracing the need for and potential of the other kind of power. In his famous 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Frederick Douglass castigated white Americans who celebrated their independence but continued to allow his people to remain in bondage. Yet he also predicted the demise of slavery in his lifetime, “drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions.”

Forty years later, at its founding convention, the People’s Party condemned the oligarchs of the Gilded Age for amassing “colossal fortunes for a few,” thus creating, with the connivance of both major parties, “the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” The Populists then offered an alternative: a daring social-democratic agenda that included a progressive income tax, government-owned railroads, and an eight-hour workday for government employees and a shortened workday for wage earners. But they expressed their vision with quasi-MAGA nostalgia. They gathered in Omaha on America’s birthday, declaring they were “filled with the spirit of the grand general and chief who established our independence.” There they vowed “to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people,’ with which class it originated.”

The impulse toward greatness surges through the decades. In his final speech, delivered the night before he was murdered in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. cited the First Amendment as the basis on which the success of every social movement depended: “somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.” For all these progressive forebears, a great nation was one whose people recognized it had serious flaws and sought, through collective action, to correct them.

Some on the contemporary left and most on today’s right reject that belief—for different reasons, of course. If one views the United States as a “settler-colonial” nation akin to South Africa under Dutch and English rule or Algeria during the French dominion, any yearning for national greatness is simply a liberal delusion based on a genocidal lie. America can become “great” only if its original inhabitants regain possession of their lands, which will never happen. For their part, the MAGA faithful scorn anyone who confronts the manifest inequalities in the nation’s past as “woke” enemies of God, the flag, and their beloved president. But if those who want America to be great do not insist on reforming what ails it, they mouth nothing but self-defensive cant.

Progressives who insisted the nation could be greater helped enact egalitarian reforms, but they seldom came without exceptions based largely on race. Jacksonian Democrats expanded the franchise to include nearly all white men but, at the same time, made it harder for free African Americans to vote. Labor unionists in the early twentieth century achieved higher wages for their members but demonized Chinese immigrants as servile “coolies” who, charged Samuel Gompers, never went on strike because they “haven’t attained some degree of manhood and independence.” Liberal Democratic politicians in the past century oversaw the building of a middle-class society, but Black people, Latinos, Asians, women, and homosexuals had to organize mass movements to claim their rightful place in it and convince many of those officeholders to support them.

Now, as before, progressives cannot be effective in calling for great changes in our society if they allow their adversaries to claim the mantle of patriotism for themselves alone. It would be lovely if, as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum once wrote, we could focus solely on “human problems of people in particular concrete situations, not problems growing out of a national identity that is altogether unlike that of others.” But neither she nor other progressives who eschew patriotism offer any convincing guidance about how to carry out their laudable objectives in a world in which nation-states reign supreme and likely will for decades to come. Instead of raging against their persistence, we should do what we can to help realize the best rather than the worst possibilities of belief in our country and its people. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained in 1967, “I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America.” His most “passionate desire,” he declared, was “to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world.”

As King showed throughout his tragically shortened career, a pursuit of greatness has to demand an expansion of popular rule. Democracy is not just better than the alternatives; it has been and remains the only way to remedy the ills of the nation in enduring ways—to form a union that will never be perfect but did, over time, become more inclusive and just.

In the end, there has never been a substitute for civic action—thoughtful, organized, and patient—to inch closer to a better, more equal nation. Two of the greatest writers in U.S. history made that commitment clear in particularly eloquent ways. In 1887, William James counseled: 

The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them.

The philosopher penned that in a tribute to Robert Gould Shaw, the white abolitionist and Union officer who led Black soldiers in a bloody battle of the Civil War in which he died along with hundreds of his men.

Nearly half a century later, Langston Hughes struck a balance between the potential of national greatness and the oppressive realities of life for so many Americans that the Great Depression had only made worse:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
(…)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(…)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

(…)

We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!