MAGA’s Crisis of Confidence in America

If you press Donald Trump’s most ardent fans to describe what they mean when they say, “make America great again,” you’ll get a lot of answers. Drill down on the phrase’s chronological implications, however — “again” most certainly suggests that there was a point at which America was great and is no longer — and you’re likely to get an earful about a bygone age in which America was confident in itself, its values, and its national mission. The MAGA Right has a point there.

Over the post-war decades, it became fashionable among the sophisticate set to cast aspersions on the notion that the United States was an “exceptional nation” save in its capacity for exceptional violence and parochialism. A Howard Zinn–style revisionism recast America as a force for, if not evil, at least the grubby, materialistic statecraft that isn’t especially distinct from any other self-interested nation. Its values may be laudable, but they are aspirational ideals that fall far short of the American experience. And if America is just another nation, it has little right to lecture — much less coerce — illiberal regimes to commit to democratic reforms. “Liberty” is a cudgel with which America bludgeons its adversaries and a fiction that serves only to pacify its citizens. Better to dispense with this naïve children’s story than to make ourselves hypocrites on the world stage by demanding behaviors from others we ourselves do not evince.

About the Author

Noah Rothman

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review. His third book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence, was published by Hachette in May 2026.

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If you press Donald Trump’s most ardent fans to describe what they mean when they say, “make America great again,” you’ll get a lot of answers. Drill down on the phrase’s chronological implications, however — “again” most certainly suggests that there was a point at which America was great and is no longer — and you’re likely to get an earful about a bygone age in which America was confident in itself, its values, and its national mission. The MAGA Right has a point there.

Over the post-war decades, it became fashionable among the sophisticate set to cast aspersions on the notion that the United States was an “exceptional nation” save in its capacity for exceptional violence and parochialism. A Howard Zinn–style revisionism recast America as a force for, if not evil, at least the grubby, materialistic statecraft that isn’t especially distinct from any other self-interested nation. Its values may be laudable, but they are aspirational ideals that fall far short of the American experience. And if America is just another nation, it has little right to lecture — much less coerce — illiberal regimes to commit to democratic reforms. “Liberty” is a cudgel with which America bludgeons its adversaries and a fiction that serves only to pacify its citizens. Better to dispense with this naïve children’s story than to make ourselves hypocrites on the world stage by demanding behaviors from others we ourselves do not evince.

About the Author

Noah Rothman

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review. His third book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence, was published by Hachette in May 2026.