The spoils of war: nostalgia and coherence

Reading The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Volume Two of Pulitzer Prize winning historian Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy", causes a reader to consider what it means for a country not only to be "great" but to be "great again."

If the first question is worth asking, the second is more so.

In the case of fairly recent American history--World War II--it's now clear we simply out produced our enemies, the Axis powers, in manpower and weaponry. Atkinson notes that by February 1944, a turning point in the war's prosecution, "the American war machine had become the 'prodigy of organization' so admired by Churchill and so dreaded by German commanders." Yankee efficiency "outproduced the Axis fourfold in heavy guns, fivefold in bombers, and sevenfold in transport planes. In the last eighteen months of World War II, Germany produced seventy thousand trucks; the Allies collectively turned out more than one million...the nation's conversion from a commercial to a military economy was as complete as it ever would be." (pps. 450-451).

"Great again." What does great again mean now?

It seems to be a call to a time long gone, when a major world economy was born in a time of crisis that was almost exclusively based on out-producing the economies of its enemies, and putting that production to use in fighting what is now thought of as the last just war. Great in war, greater after war, greater yet in promulgating our greatness, greater still in the world-wide promotion of the greatness of our greatness, greater in everything to the degree that we are the greatest ever, and so on. 

The words, "make America great again," seem to have wormed their way into some part of the nation's soul, especially with citizens who live in the present but long for the past. But the past is severly wounded and heavy with trauma, as the user of those words well knows; the speaker, not being wounded himself, having profited from the over production first made necessary by the great war and then parlayed for at least three generations to his great benefit, speaks to a wound others really feel.

It's worth thinking about why the people spoken to about their nation's need for greatness feel the way they feel--that the present has left them so far behind and that the future is bleak--and how a slogan made of the words "make America great again," caused them to yearn so ardently for a past that never actually existed.