Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan has huge licensing potential. It could, with some obvious tweaks, go global: “Make France Great Again,” “Make Japan Great Again,” and so on. MAGA is a punchy political catchphrase, to be sure. It certainly has more inspirational oomph than Hillary Clinton’s “Stronger Together.”
But more than that, MAGA’s nostalgia has persuasive power because it is based on a real economic phenomenon experienced by citizens of all advanced economies, one documented by former Economist journalist Marc Levinson in his new book. The immediate post-war decades — the years 1948 through 1973, to be precise — saw the world economy boom as never before. This “Golden Age,” Levinson writes, “blossomed” from “a world in ruin” to one of unimagined prosperity — hardly the continuation of global depression expected by many economists.
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