It’s not even an original slogan. Reagan used it back in the 80s.
In all seriousness, though, the failure of the MAGA movement to define which era of American history was supposedly “great” is both a stroke of political genius (meaning that anyone who wants to identify with “MAGA” can choose their own adventure — turn the clock back to the 1950s? The 1920s? The 1860s? Heck — the 1770s?) and an intellectual travesty.
You can never pin down what “MAGA” exactly means. Might as well try to have a boxing match with water. It’s designed to simply evoke in its target audience a haze of nostalgia and a vague feeling that the old days (when? whenever you like) were better.
The irony is there is little doubt that an average American living *today* enjoys a much better living standard, lives longer, and has access to far more opportunities than past generations of Americans. Certainly that is overwhelmingly the case for black Americans, for women, for LGBTQ people, and religious minorities.
Personally? My own idea of When America Was Great would be to turn the clock back only to about 2015. When Obama was still President, when SCOTUS wasn’t yet packed with radicals, and before Trump descended his golden escalator and stomped all over the American mindscape and infected half the country with his petty narcissism and grievances.