Perhaps it’s the large part of my life spent in advertising that gives me such a distrust of slogans. I’ve written a lot of them, a few of them still in use decades after their creation. Generally, I’m proud of them. At best, a good slogan sums up the client’s desired position in a few words. At worst, they’re just puff of empty air. There’s one true thing about slogans: in and of themselves, they mean absolutely nothing. It’s what behind them that makes them real.

Take Eastern Airlines, for instance. Eastern’s claim to be “The Wings of Man” or to having to “Earn Our Wings Everyday” sounded good, but was hollow long before they ceased operations in 1991. Once those slogans probably had substance, but not in their last days. The slogans were neither believable nor believed. Eastern had encountered a hard truth: it’s a lot easier to write a slogan than to live up to it.

Which brings us to perhaps the most bandied-about slogan of our time: Make America Great Again.

For nearly two years, whenever I encountered people wearing MAGA apparel or shouting “Make America Great Again," I’ve asked them to explain it to me, to tell me what “Make America Great Again” really means. But either nobody knows what it means, or they aren’t willing to say. With a single exception. One of my ex-partners said that it referred to the time when we were racist and kicked butt militarily. I assume that he was serious, but even when we were partners I could never really tell.

But I keep seeing hats with “MAGA” across the front and often with angry faces under them. On the surface—where it appears most of the people spend most of their time—it’s a laudable idea. Who doesn’t want to be great or to live in a great country. But details and definitions are not parts of slogans. Those things are left to those who actually want to understand what the slogan means. But without the details and definitions, MAGA has about the same degree of profundity as “Honk if you love Jesus.” It simply calls for a cheap, meaningless display.

If anyone wants to get beneath the surface, I suggest that they consider two questions. The obvious one is: “What does MAGA really mean?” The other one, just as obvious but seemingly ignored is: “What’s this ‘again’ stuff? Has America ever been truly great?”

I believe that we have had our great moments. I believe that we have the potential for real greatness. But I don’t believe that at any point our history we can say with a straight face that our country was great for all of our citizens. We did good things, some great things, and some awful things, but we tended to build our history on the good things. For instance, I was taught in grade school about the transcontinental railroad and the Golden Spike. My teachers left out the part about the Chinese laborers who were imported to build it and paid a fraction of what the laborers from Europe were paid. We were taught about the Winning of the West, but didn’t spend a lot of time on what was essentially genocide. We learned about the quest for freedom from religious persecution, but not a lot about the persecution of religious minorities.

And because I’m a professional Southerner and dearly love some parts of southern culture, it’s been difficult to praise the praiseworthy without seeming to be an apologist for the segregated culture that the south was built on.

I’ve lived through nearly a third of our country’s history, and I can’t think of any time our greatness extended to all of our citizens. The best thing we can say is that we spread our bigotry around: African-Americans, Irish, Italians, Indians, Hispanics, Mormons, Catholics, Poles, Chinese, Japanese, Muslims, Jews, women, poor, sick, disabled, and Lord knows who else. That makes it difficult, if not impossible for some of our citizens to subscribe to the concept of making America great again. For them it hasn’t been great the first time.

Which may lead to a working definition of MAGA: “I got mine, and I’m not going let you take it away from me.” There’s good evidence of this in the faces under the MAGA caps. White and frightened. Donald Trump fed their fear by telling them that somebody—Mexicans, Muslims, or the Media—was going to take what they had. It’s strange that we fear the Muslim down the street and praise the rhetoric that Trump uses to tweak the nose of a dictator as narcissistic and unstable as he is and armed with nuclear missiles.

It’s axiomatic in business that nobody develops muscles by patting himself on the back. It’s more important to find the things that aren’t working and either make them work or get rid of them. But we haven’t done that, and until we do, we not only won’t be great, we won’t get better. 

If somebody can provide me with a definition of Make America Great that involves creating opportunities for all of our citizens, for improving our decaying infrastructure, and providing moral leadership, I’ll sign up immediately. But if all we’re going to do about it is spout the slogan, I’ll subscribe to the alternate definition: Morons are governing America.