MAWA
The cultural Marxists said in 2016 and said again this year that President Trump’s slogan, Make American Great Again (MAGA), is code for MAWA: Make America White Again. The Left throws words around with little regard for their meaning; indeed, it claims “deconstruction” allows it to give any word whatever meaning it wants. But those of us who have not fallen through the looking glass know words do have meaning, and we find once again it is useful to look at the Left’s slogan and ask what it means.
The first clue to what Make America White Again means is the word “again”. We know America was never a really racially all-White country. The Indians outnumbered Whites for many years after settlement began in Virginia and Massachusetts. Blacks arrived as slaves as early as 1619. (Had it not been for slavery, America would have very few blacks; 17th and 18th century Africans had neither ships, the navigational skills, nor the money to come here any other way.) So whatever MAWA means, its meaning is not racial, because there is no earlier all-White America to return to. “Again” must refer to something else.
The cultural Marxists themselves have made plain what a “White America” means to them. It means a country that is culturally White. The editorial in the September/October issue of The American Conservative magazine usefully shows this cultural orientation:
In their zeal to erase history, organizations like the Smithsonian Institution have. . . ventured into dangerous territory by labeling concepts such as “objective thinking”, “work before play”, “plan for the future”, and “delayed gratification” as “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” and therefore suspect. . .
Thankfully, the Smithsonian . . . issued an apology.
There was no need for an apology. Those values and others like them are culturally White. They represent the society-wide adoption of middle class values that began in the White 17th century Netherlands and triumphed in White 18th century England, a triumph marked by the popular success of Richardson’s novel Pamela, a paean to bourgeois virtues, in 1750. By the Victorian period, named for a White queen, those White middle-class virtues were almost universal for all social classes in White Europe and North America, were being carried to other climes and races by White colonialism, and were being adopted by Black Americans and Hispanic Americans as well. Middle class values work better than any others to create safe, ordered, prosperous, and free societies, and they were, and are, the creation of White people. Oriental societies have at times had values, such as those of Confucianism, that led to safe, ordered, prosperous societies. But those societies were not free.
If we look at the values the Smithsonian labelled “White”, we see why we should glory in them as great achievements of the White race. “Objective thinking” means basing thought in reality. If you want a bridge not to fall down, it helps if its engineers’ calculations were objective. If we seek government policies that work, we must derive them from an objective look at social problems. The opposite of “objective thinking” is magical thinking, and many primitive societies have been steeped in it. That is why they remained primitive.
“Delayed gratification”, another “aspect and assumption of Whiteness”, is perhaps the single most important virtue in the creation of civilization itself, as well as for a successful individual life. It means doing something that is difficult or unpleasant now because of the future benefit it will bring. Absent delayed gratification, no capital, physical or human, can accumulate because it is all immediately consumed for momentary pleasure. “Work before play” and “plan for the future” derive from the virtue of delayed gratification and, like it, are essential to any society or person that wants life to get better over time. These “White” virtues--and they are White in their origins--are among Whites’ greatest contributions to universal human happiness. We should be offended, not that the Smithsonian labeled them White, but that it apologized for doing so.
Ironically, no part of America needs standard middle-class values more than the Black urban community. It once adhered to those values. That is why the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s succeeded. White people said to themselves, “America’s colored people live the same way we do. Why should they be subordinated just for the color of their skin?” But just as American Blacks were on the edge of attaining the equal treatment they had long sought, cultural Marxism and its message of instant gratification flooded over the Black urban community and destroyed it from within. The same Leftists who now portray Blacks as “victims” are themselves the victimizers. They are the prisoners, and the middle-class virtues they condemn, White in origin, are the antidote. Might there be a courageous rapper out there willing to don a MAWA hat in his next music video?