MAGA to MAGNA
“True greatness—magnanimity—is rooted in giving our selves away, not attempting to make ourselves great again.”
Each of us wants to be “great” and achieve something memorable. We want to rise above, see clearer, see deeper, see from afar. We want to know more, be more, and do more than others around us. This is instinctual—a “fundamental human drive.” The impulse to be great motivates us to discover new ideas, create innovative tools, build lasting structures, and establish meaningful social connections, which would truly make us more than we could ever be by ourselves. This leads us to go out into the world, communicate, and connect with others. We post pictures on social media, give kudos, like things, and try to expand our networks by linking our ideas with others. All of this is in service to being “greater.”
Former President Donald Trump understands this instinct, perhaps better than anyone in America. He has tapped into it for decades and used it to align Americans’ search for meaning with the things he’s been acquiring for himself and then offering back to us vicariously: real estate deals, casinos, media influence, stardom and celebrity, and power. It is incredible to see the diversity of individuals who have been drawn to him—from Playboy Playmates to evangelical leaders, from Wall Street powerbrokers to working class laborers—rich and poor, politicians and voters, the famous and the down-on-their-luck. Trump has been attractive to many. He’s been alluring and appealing because he tapped into this drive we share—the desire to be greater than we currently are, no matter our position or status.
That someone understands our instincts and knows how to use them is not problematic on its face. Most of our culture is premised on each of us taking advantage of this instinct in some way. The entertainment industry entices us to theatres and television screens with thoughts of living larger, achieving, and overcoming; investment and insurance firms leverage our hopes to be richer and safer; healthcare companies offer us illness and age abatement remedies; food and travel experiences are served up to expand our sense of taste and geographical reach; and artificial intelligence companies offer tools that allow us to be “creators” by typing just a few keys. There is much here to be grasped and gained that is good. We are better people in many ways because of our responses to these invitations to our better instincts. However, goodness darkens and greatness turns evil when we are invited or manipulated to bring harm to ourselves or others. This includes not only overt and active harm, but also the type of harm we experience from becoming less than we might have otherwise been.
Donald Trump has brought about both kinds of harm (active traumas and greatness-lessening traumas) throughout his political career. The former president has treated our instinct for greatness like a slot machine, where he pulls the lever, seeking to empty us of our better selves in order to gain attention, financial reward, and power. In what follows, I will be investigating Trump’s harms by looking at five values he promotes. These values have diverted Americans for too long from authentic human greatness.
As Americans, and as human beings, we can be better than Trump’s values. Each of us, no matter who we are or what our position, can be smarter, more self-aware, and authentically great. We are called to be much more than ATMs for Trump’s psychological and material needs. However, to live better—to live authentically great lives—we will need to Un-MAGA our values.
MAGA Values in Photo-Negative
“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) is the central value-phrase Trump uses to activate our instinct for greatness. MAGA stimulates a simultaneous sense of loss for, and desire to work and fight to regain some part of our past—whether real or imagined. The phrase is generic in a way that it can be all things to all people. Who hasn’t experienced loss? And who would not want to get something valuable back? Trump for his part had the brilliant (and self-serving) idea to trademark and market this motivational phrase, and then turn it into a repetitive rallying cry to channel our fears and hopes for his benefit.
I will be highlighting five core MAGA values that play on these fears and hopes, bringing harm in their path. The list is not meant to be exhaustive of the values driving negative actions in the MAGA-sphere, and I am not the first to discuss them. My goal is, however, to show how these values can be redirected in ways that will allow us to be authentically great. The five MAGA values are: 1) insular self-interest; 2) cultural homogenizing; 3) social wall building; 4) patriotic ranting; and 5) self-serving aggression. Like Trump, these values are attractive to many people. But I will argue that there are better and truly authentic value-paths to greatness. My approach requires that we look at MAGA values from a different vantage—envisioning what they would be like in photo-negative or on an inverted-platform to reveal values that are opposite and superior in western history.
The task of mapping a path to authentic greatness is not easy. American conceptions of greatness are diverse and complex. Some of this is due to the shifting conceptions of greatness in western civilization, from Aristotle’s characterization of the “magnanimous” person (“great-souled,” megalopsychos) in ancient Greece, to a long history of Christian conceptions of greatness as service, to Enlightenment standards for personal greatness, and uniquely American models of the great person. In The Measure of Greatness, the philosopher Sophia Vassalou and fellow writers have provided a broad-ranging, in-depth discussion of the virtues and traits of greatness from these historical philosophical perspectives. Robert C. Roberts concludes the discussion, noting that a standard for greatness is “dependent on contestable conceptions of human nature and understandings of the good. The notion of greatness as applied to a soul is plastic, adaptable to just about any evaluative framework.” As it stands, when looking for greatness principles, we have a complex history and a “plastic” subject, which forces us to ask if we could ever set out any meaningful standard for the here and now. Albert Borgman the late immigrant-American philosopher of technology—who washed dishes on a passenger ship to make his way here from Germany—encountered the same problem when attempting to provide general ethics standards for our country. In Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country (2006) Borgmann asked, “Is it possible to say something coherent and substantial about the norms and values that people in this country observe or ought to follow? Isn’t it one of the most diverse societies in the world?” Borgmann was able to define a set of theoretical and practical ethics values he thought had socially-shared weight and substance—values rooted in our historical life as a nation. I think the same can be articulated in the realm of greatness-making values—values that are socially-shared, broadly accepted, goodness-inducing, and greater-making.
To help us gain the photo-negative vantage, I will use the letter “N” to create a new mnemonic from MAGA, and a rallying cry that might move us in a new direction. MAGA with an “N” inserted, becomes “MAGNA”—the Latin word for “great.” This word is used in the collegiate honor awarded to deserving undergraduates, magna cum laud (“with great praise”). I will be using the letter “N” in MAGNA to represent a “negation” or “nothingness,” which lies at the heart of any true search for greatness. Before one can be truly great and achieve significance, one must pursue a negation of certain values, including the five MAGA values I am highlighting.
There is precedent for using negation as a way of seeking that which is best for our shared lives.
John Rawls—arguably the greatest 20th-century political philosopher—offered a new approach to understanding the social contract that binds us together as Americans and human beings. His project can, I think, also be understood as a philosophical plan for greatness-seeking—a blueprint for being our “best selves." For Rawls, the social contract needs to be considered from an “original position,” which can stand as the starting point for conceiving our better selves and a better society. To put our minds in this original position, Rawls asked us to perform a reflective thought experiment where we imagine ourselves deprived of all of our specific advantages—wealth, status, social ties, and so on—essentially considering ourselves as having “nothing” of our current identities. Imagine entering into the world stripped of most of what makes you specifically you—a negation of all your specific personal and social advantages. In this place we could imagine how we would approach negotiating the social contract with our fellow Americans (other similarly stripped selves) behind what Rawls called a “veil of ignorance.” From this place, Rawls thought we could discover what the best ways of acting and interacting would be. Rawls described the situation this way in his 1971 masterpiece A Theory of Justice:
Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities.
And from this place of self-negation, Rawls invited us to begin reordering society in ways that are best for our bare selves and thereby also for others. This perspective is meant to be lasting and have broad—perhaps universal—reach. As Rawls said at the end of his book:
The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint.
A Rawlsian approach to greatness-seeking would be achieved through a self-negating process—finding the best by first emptying ourselves of self and our advantages, then considering what would be “best” for ourselves in relation to others and the world. This type of self-negating method is found in many other places in our culture. In the military, “Selfless Service” is a hallmark value for the United States Army, by which soldiers “Put the welfare of the nation, the Army and [their] subordinates before [their] own . . . doing [their] duty loyally without thought of recognition or gain.” In business, companies that practice “corporate social responsibility” place limits on themselves based on the possible negative impacts their activities could have on society. In religion, Christians believe that they are creatio ex nihilo (created from nothing) and practice sacrificial service knowing “they are dust, and to dust they shall return” (cf. Genesis, 3:19). And in leadership education, “servant,” “selfless,” and “compassionate” leadership models encourage leaders to look to the needs of others rather than their own interests, rejecting traditional hierarchical models, where the emphasis is on a leader’s personality, charisma, position, power, or influence.
In what follows, I use negation in similar fashion to outline five counter-MAGA values that can fuel our move from MAGA to MAGNA—from a pseudo-greatness built on self-directed values to an authentic greatness built on personal and social growth, and world-expanding values.
Unselfing America: Embracing Service Rather Than Self-Interest
The road to authentic greatness starts with the self. But counterintuitively it does not begin by taking the road that seems most natural, down which we amplify ourselves. Rather, authentic greatness is found down the road of de-amplifying and un-selfing our egos.
First, let’s look at where self-interest and egocentric living leads. Our egos stand like sentinels for our emotions and desires, urging us to acquire as much adulation, material benefit, and gratification as we can. Christopher S. Reina, an Associate Professor of Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, describes the self-interested ego this way in “Mindfulness: A Tool for Thoughtful Politics”:
The ego is the voice in our head that is always talking to us and guiding our behavior . . . [it] seeks to protect us at all costs. . . . assumes all incoming information is self-relevant and makes up stories about that information.
Reina goes on to outline what is harmful about this way of orienting ourselves:
The problem with this ego-based processing is that every story revolves around us by default such that everything becomes personal. . . . The ego knows no boundaries; it only knows how to continually seek out victories to reinforce its own value. Mindlessly living life consumed by past or future concerns relies on our most basic fight-or-flight and ego-driven programming and does not engage our higher-level thinking abilities. It generates fear and hate, which then spread to others via emotional and social contagion.
This is a picture of a self trapped within its own vision, in its own narrative about the world—“stuck in a moment,” as U2 says. This type of socially contagious self-interest is at the heart of MAGA and is nothing new for Trump. The Art of The Deal is filled with vignettes of a life of ambition with its desires to turn situations and people to his self-interest—to “play” them, as he says. That Trump’s self-interest has morphed into a type of narcissism (an extreme form of self-interest) is also not new—highly qualified people identified this characteristic in him before he was elected president. And just last year, Bill Barr, who supported and served as Trump’s Attorney General, said:
He [Trump]—he will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country's interests. There's no question about it. This is a perfect example of that. He's like—he's like a 9-year-old, a defiant 9-year-old kid who is always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it. It's a means of self-assertion and exerting his dominance over other people. And he's—he's a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country's, his personal gratification of his—you know, of his ego.
Trump’s self-interest has even been identified in the types of self-aggrandizing art he promotes, from NFTs to trading cards, from a self-centered portrait hung in his White House private dining room to his glorification of an infamous mugshot. The will to own—to play others—and to self-brand everything around him, from sneakers to bibles, has even led Trump’s son to claim his father’s ownership of Republicanism, saying on January 6, 2021: “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”
We should have no illusions about Trump’s self-interest. As the eminent neoconservative writer Bill Kristol has recently noted, recalling a conversation he'd had with David Axelrod: “Trump’s in it for himself. And you [are] just along for the ride. And you may like some things he’s saying, but you can’t count on them, you know, manifesting themselves in any actual action that will help you.”
But what harm comes from such self-centered attention in a purported leader?
Fear is the primary harm associated with self-interest. Martha Nussbaum, a prolific political philosopher of our time, says in The Monarchy of Fear that this “primitive” emotion is “asocial,” and “connected to the monarchical desire to control others rather than to trust them to be independent and themselves.” Fear harms the self by giving it a distorted, one-sided understanding of the world and leads a person to harm others through mechanisms of control in order to place oneself in the highest power position available.
Trump has lived in fear his entire life and has survived by exerting power in failed attempts to aggressively outmaneuver fear. His sister Mary Trump describes the situation this way in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man:
Donald continues to exist in the dark space between the fear of indifference and the fear of failure that led to his brother’s destruction. It took forty-two years for the destruction to be completed, but the foundations were laid early and played out before Donald’s eyes as he was experiencing his own trauma. The combination of those two things—what he witnessed and what he experienced—both isolated him and terrified him. The role that fear played in his childhood and the role it plays now can’t be overstated. And the fact that fear continues to be an overriding emotion for him speaks to the hell that must have existed inside the [Trump family] House six decades ago.
For his part, Trump thinks of himself as having become strong and successful in response to this fear-based emotional-pressure-cooker home environment created by his father. He contrasts his response to that of his older brother Fred’s “downward spiral” to alcoholism and death at forty-two. In The Art of the Deal he says of Fred Jr., “In many ways he had it all, but the pressures of our particular family were not for him.” Yet for all his swagger, it is evident that Trump developed highly negative, self-interested defenses to his childhood of fear. The psychiatrist Steve Wruble describes in “Trump’s Daddy Issues” that “Despite their [Trump’s and his father’s] appreciation for each other, the tension between father and son caused Donald psychological wounds that still fester.” His ego—nurtured from a young age in this primal human emotion—survived using the defensive and deflective tools of aggression, bullying, isolationism, disgust and dehumanization, and bending narratives to one’s advantage (to name just a few).
Trump cannot lead without bringing both types of harm noted above, direct harm to his and our selves as well as the harm of preventing authentic greatness from flourishing in himself and us. His fear and adapted responses have become his lived world, and he is virally and contagiously spreading his fear and methods of reacting to MAGA followers.
We need to see his self-interest for what it is, a response to an inner divided life with its “hidden” brokenness (to flip Parker Palmer’s metaphor). Trump cannot lead us to an authentic greatness, for as the psychotherapist Harper West notes in his article “In Relationship with an Abusive President,” “Healthy relationships require partners who are calm, thoughtful, and deliberate, not fearful and reactive. Fear-driven behaviors and a lack of insight are exactly the opposite of what we should expect of a safe, dependable partner or leader.”
So where do we turn for safety and dependability on the quest for greatness? Whose lead can we follow?
American leadership—focused on the ideals of human dignity, equality, liberty, and justice—is rooted in each American individually, and of necessity becomes a shared activity where each “takes responsibility” not only for every other American, but also for all of humanity. It may seem paradoxical that I am saying leadership starts with the self; however, authentic leadership and greatness is to be found in selves whose focus is directed outwardly, externally on others, rather than inwardly on gratification of personal needs and desires. Accordingly, authentic American leadership has always called on individuals to “sacrifice” (from the word “sacred”) and serve on behalf of others.
We see such calls to service in the great speeches and writings of our forebears, perhaps never stated as eloquently as John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural speech, when he said:
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
At the end of this speech, Kennedy invited Americans to put this attitude into action and in unity “go forth to lead the land we love.” He understood that leadership is a shared activity that we each must take up with an attitude directed away from self and toward others, the nation, and our world.
Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy’s republican predecessor, was present for the 1961 inauguration and peaceful transfer of power. Like Kennedy, Eisenhower was a decorated military officer who had experienced the traumas inflicted on the world by despotic leaders during WWII. A sense of service and drive to act for the benefit of others was something Eisenhower shared with Kennedy. In his first inaugural speech delivered just eight years earlier, Eisenhower let the American people know the need to serve others applies even to politicians:
At such a time in history, we who are free must proclaim anew our faith. This faith is the abiding creed of our fathers. It is our faith in the deathless dignity of man, governed by eternal moral and natural laws.
This faith defines our full view of life. It establishes, beyond debate, those gifts of the Creator that are man's inalienable rights, and that make all men equal in His sight.
In the light of this equality, we know that the virtues most cherished by free people—love of truth, pride of work, devotion to country—all are treasures equally precious in the lives of the most humble and of the most exalted. The men who mine coal and fire furnaces, and balance ledgers, and turn lathes, and pick cotton, and heal the sick and plant corn—all serve as proudly and as profitably for America as the statesmen who draft treaties and the legislators who enact laws.
This faith rules our whole way of life. It decrees that we, the people, elect leaders not to rule but to serve.
The direction of action is important in these speeches. We work to serve others, our nation. We are leaders in a shared service to humankind, no matter our station in life.
This direction of action has been flipped by Trump—coaxing our lesser selves into a limited view of who we are. In his inaugural address in 2017 the direction of action was clear: “At the center of this [MAGA] movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.” And he advocated for a self-interested country where “America First” is the motto because “it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.”
One cannot help but think that this inward-looking, insular focus, would appall the Republican Party’s first president, Abraham Lincoln, who called out those who were advocating for expanding slavery in America and who were “insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.” Slavery, control, and oppression of other humans is the extreme logical end of the self-interested use of power—in persons and in countries. Lincoln hated the ongoing institution of slavery and the self-interest driving it,
because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; . . . and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.
While slavery is the extreme end of self-interest, isolationism, protectionism, hoarding, and unresponsiveness to the needs of others is the passive side of a selfish-orientation. Each of these tendencies is fused to the MAGA-sphere.
A century after Lincoln, in a United States still enmeshed in the structural and personal effects of slavery, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon two months before his death to spur his followers to service; it was entitled “The Drum Major Instinct”. In his sermon, King outlined the drive and effects of self-interest and America First ideas, then offered America a new definition of greatness, one found in Jesus’s teaching. In response to the requests from Jesus’s disciples to be placed in positions of authority and prestige, Jesus did not castigate the disciples for their self-interested instincts, rather,
he did something altogether different. He said in substance, "Oh, I see, you want to be first. You want to be great. You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. If you're going to be my disciple, you must be." But he reordered priorities. And he said, "Yes, don't give up this instinct. It's a good instinct if you use it right. (Yes) It's a good instinct if you don't distort it and pervert it. Don't give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. (Amen) I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That is what I want you to do."
. . .
And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. (Amen) That's a new definition of greatness.
In a radical reimagining of self, King exhorted America to embrace and transform self-interest by redirecting it to continual service to others. Like John Rawls, King challenged those who see their wealth or status or ethnicity as a point of privilege to turn those privileges into a parade of action for the benefit of all human beings, no matter their status, their wealth, their ethnicity, or their similarities or dissimilarities to them.
The many MAGA pastors, who preach Trump’s virtues, have lost sight of what King and other Christian pastors, theologians, and philosophers have affirmed for centuries, that “Christ’s greatness, shown in humble service to others rather than in selfseeking, becomes the greatness of those he serves, their own habit of virtue, even that crown of virtue that is magnanimity” (Jennifer A. Hardt in “Strengthening Hope for the Greatest Things: Aquinas’s Redemption of Magnanimity” ).
For all his efforts at generating wealth and trying to be a self-made man, Trump has not understood American greatness or what makes it authentic.
He would do well to take a lesson from the wealthiest citizen in America’s history, John D. Rockefeller Sr., a devout Christian, a republican who supported Abraham Lincoln, a man who was “not only self-made but self-invented,” a man who was antislavery, a man who can be faulted for many of the ways he acquired wealth but who understood that wealth is made to be given away, and who said that, “the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.”
True greatness—magnanimity—is rooted in giving our selves away . . . in un-selfing, not in attempting to make our selves great again.
Understanding the self and how to redirect it from an inward to an outward focus—from self-interest to service—is the starting point for moving to authentic greatness. The next four MAGNA values depend on getting this foundational orientation right. The more we un-self and seek out a service-oriented life, the more we will find that other MAGNA values come to us naturally, and the less we will be able to give any weight to MAGA values.
Sections to Follow
Unhomogenizing America: Embracing Diversity As Our Identity
Unwalling America: Embracing Our Immigrant Status Rather Than Isolation
Unranting America: Embracing Gracious Discourse Rather Than Hateful Speech
Unaggressing America: Embracing Nonviolence Rather Than Picking A Fight
Stepping Out in Authentic Greatness