America 250: Our Progress. Our Peril. Our Path Forward.

To counter a MAGA “revolution,” we may need a new (OK, old) refresh of the bill of rights.

I was born a couple of years shy of the nation’s bicentennial, which is to admit I’ve lived through a fifth of the American experiment. And, as the nation teeters towards its 250th birthday, I am struck both by how much hard progress has been won in the last fifty years — and also why the reactionary MAGA movement remains so eager to stage a “second American Revolution” (as Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it) to turn back the clock.

The American idea I grew up with is powerful because it is expansive. It captures a collective striving of people who were born here and of those who recently arrived. If we all lean in, or so the story goes, the nation’s catalytic reaction continues. America becomes bigger. We are bettered. And that forward progress lifts the hope that we can transcend the sins of our founding — of slavery and Native displacement — and more fully embody the ideals of equality found in our Declaration of Independence.

FDR Memorial — Washington DC (Credit: Tim Evanson)

The path of the last five decades has been uneven and cannot be sugar-coated. The Reagan era of my childhood was reactionary in its own way — blunting the progress of the Civil Rights era, and reimposing America’s global dominance following the humiliation of Vietnam. Growing up, I saw our hugely powerful government treat vulnerable domestic populations as disposable: Americans with HIV were left to waste, alone, by bigoted leaders who weren’t unhappy to see gay men dying en masse. And Republicans, in league with many “tough on crime” Democrats, sent Richard Nixon’s racist War on Drugs into hyperdrive — fueling an era of mass-incarceration that destroyed countless families of color, and swelled our prison population to nearly 2 million souls.

And yet — at least until Trump arrived on the national stage — the long arc of America’s moral universe still seemed to bend toward justice.

Into my adulthood, an expanding role for minorities in public life appeared to have irreversible momentum, even among conservatives. Those George W. Bush years, after all, saw the rise of figures like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Alberto Gonzales, who — hate or love their politics — embodied what seemed to be a genuine embrace of diversity on the right.

Then, in 2008, something wildly implausible happened, which offered proof of the power of that expansive idea of America. The election of Barack Obama as president validated a narrative of national progress, and exorcised (at least a few) racist demons. This Harvard-educated, half-Kenyan senator with roots in Hawaii and a simple message of “Hope and Change” turned Ohio, Florida, and even Indiana — Indiana! — blue.

Simultaneously, a civic and political progress for American women gained velocity. When I was born, women had just won the right to secure a credit card without a husband’s approval. Since those sexist 1970s, women’s participation in the labor force had surged, the wage gap had shrunk, and women had overtaken men as a proportion of college graduates. Towering figures like Speaker Nancy Pelosi proved that a woman’s place is running the House of Representatives — like an absolute boss.

Perhaps most remarkably, thanks to countless individual acts of bravery, my lifetime has also witnessed the integration of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans into the fabric of American life. I’ve never felt a greater patriotism than I did standing outside the Supreme Court on the 2015 morning when the Obergefell decision — establishing same-sex marriage rights nationwide — came down, and I listened as a gay men’s chorus broke into song on the court’s steps.

Of course, these simultaneous forward-leaps for women, Black Americans, and sexual minorities represented a setback for a white, male patriarchy unaccustomed to ceding power or control. And the browning of America — the nation was about 5 percent foreign-born in the 1970s, compared to nearly 15 percent today — stirred a panic among white nationalists. The pendulum of progress was primed for a reversal.

The 2016 nomination of a woman to the presidency seemed to break something deep in the American psyche. When push came to shove — when decency faced off with misogyny — the ugly face of misogyny won. And the mask slipped off the rest of it. For the American right, a generation of pretending to care about inclusion, diversity, and “compassionate conservatism” collapsed into a black hole of nativism and resentment.

Donald Trump built his movement by licensing his followers to embrace bigotries that had been repressed, not reformed. For the MAGA crowd, America is less an idea than an exclusionary identity — reserved for people who embrace the old hierarchies that privilege white men, and protect them from the competition of more talented people who don’t look like them.

In the decade since Trump’s first election, I’ve struggled with my own sense of patriotism. The America I believed in — deeply imperfect, but striving toward high ideals — is now run by degenerate demagogues who thumb their noses at this idealism. Trump’s followers have shown themselves willing to tolerate unfathomable corruption and ruinous mismanagement — to lay waste to Reagan’s vision of a shining “city on the hill,” and even to defile the Capitol itself — to hold tight to their politics of exclusion.

Americans saw the absolute worst of Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, and through the felony convictions that followed. Yet they still re-elected him four years later, seemingly because the idea of installing a woman of color into the presidency troubled them even more than the prospect of an unmasked tyrant pursuing the reactionary agenda of Roberts, the Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025.

This MAGA “second revolution” looks like the squandering of alliances and of our standing around the globe. It accepts the brutal overreach of armed federal agents in exchange for an end to anything that smacks of diversity, reproductive freedom, or transgender expression. MAGA followers are willing to pay ruinous tariffs so long as they get a sanitized history in which America has never been a villain. And they seem willing to accept international humiliations, like the recent quagmire in Iran, if it leaves white men, no matter how mediocre, in charge of trillion-dollar institutions like the recast “Department of War.”

Perhaps the most cynical part of Trump’s MAGA project is the rejection of the notion of shared progress. He and his followers envision a zero-sum game where their gain is predicated on your loss.

The fix for this dark cynicism is not just reviving optimism about an abstract American idea, but redeeming what truly has been lost over the last five decades: A tide that lifts all boats.

To be clear, the economic tide never stopped rising. America is the richest it has ever been — and the richest nation in the history of the world. Yet American wealth inequality has widened to levels unseen even in the Gilded Age, epitomized by the recent minting of the globe’s first trillionaire: Elon Musk.

The top one percent have now hoovered up nearly a third of America’s national wealth, while the poorest 50 percent of the nation fights over just 2.5 percent of it. In my lifetime, Republicans have embraced tax cuts for the wealthiest that supercharged this phenomenon. Democrats have succeeded, at times, in blunting the edges of American hyper-capitalism, but have more often focused on notions of justice rooted in social inclusion rather than shared economic thriving.

Workers are doing their part. There have been massive increases in American labor productivity in recent decades — but these gains have not been matched by surging wages. Since 1979, worker productivity has jumped 92 percent, but hourly pay is up only a third, with the balance captured by corporations and their shareholders.

This “productivity–pay gap,” monitored by the Economic Policy Institute, is at the heart of American nostalgia for a bygone era of shared opportunity. But other datapoints drive home what has been fumbled. If the minimum wage had held steady since 1976, it would be about $13 an hour — more than double what Congress has currently guaranteed. That bicentennial standard of living also included an annual cost of public college of about $3,000 in today’s money, and a median home price of roughly $250,000.

Our political system likes to pretend that the economic struggles of the masses are too difficult or too complicated to ameliorate. But I have seen enough in these 50 years to know that’s not true. For a brief moment — during the financial upheaval of the Covid era — a simple tax credit lifted nearly 3 million children out of poverty and cut America’s child poverty rate in half, before being cruelly allowed to expire.

As we hit America’s 250th birthday, the real answer to Kevin Roberts’ notion of a second revolution just might be found in a document introduced in 1944: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “second bill of rights.”

FDR proposed that Americans should be guaranteed useful employment, a living wage, decent housing, adequate medical care, and protection from the abuses of monopolists. Substitute “billionaires,” and that New Deal agenda seems well-tailored for the challenges of our modern age. At 250, it may be time to re-embrace what FDR called for 80 years ago: Equality not just in the eyes of society or the law, but “equality in the pursuit of happiness” as well.

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Tim Dickinson is the Senior Political writer for The Contrarian