[From “Donald Trump Announces Return of National Expansion”]

Make America Great Again

What does that mean? When was America great?[…]
Trump has repeatedly answered the question in recent months: America was great in the 1890s when William McKinley was president at the end of the Gilded Age[…]
Trump was crystal clear[…]when he announced a return to Manifest Destiny, national expansion and the creation of the External Revenue Service. He spoke in what used to be familiar terms about the conquest and settlement of North America. He said nothing about “fascism” or World War II or Israel or Zionism. He said very little about foreign affairs

The Economist[…]
If you are a reactionary businessman and a billionaire from New York like Trump, wouldn’t you be nostalgic for a time of virtually unfettered free market capitalism when the country was ruled by the Rockefellers, Morgans and Carnegies who were the biggest “winners” in American history?[…]
As Southern reactionaries, we get misty eyed thinking about ancestors sitting on the front porch of the Big House, mint julep in hand, watching our slaves toil as the Confederate flag flaps in the breeze and our boys are in Virginia fighting off the Yankee Army in 1862. That’s our lost Golden Age

For our Neo-Nazi commentators, their lost Golden Age is the Third Reich in 1942 at the peak of Adolf Hitler’s conquest of Europe. Everything went to hell when Germany lost the war. There are other flavors of reactionaries like the Trad Caths who date the fall to Martin Luther and the Reformation[…]
To be a New York business tycoon in the 1890s before the Jews took over the city and ran it into the ground must be a nostalgic fantasy that that appeals to some Gentile New Yorkers. Imagine what it would have been like to be in New York City at its peak and watch the skyscrapers being built or the electricity coming on when New York was a dynamic city approaching the peak of its power