Question for Trump supporters - when did America stop being 'great'?

[angus]

Serious question - when do you think, to within five years - this happened and why?

I'm not a Trump supporter, but I'll take a shot.  When I was born, the US represent fifty percent of the world's aggregate GDP.  Today it represents about twenty percent.  50 is greater than 20. 

It's not that we have diminished, rather other societies have prospered, largely as a result of importing the American ideal. 

I'm not sure that The Donald ever suggested that the US isn't great, and in any case the term is relative.  (For example, ten is great compared to five, but small compared to twenty.) 

We shall not have half the world's GDP again, no matter what policies are pursued by the government.  Trump, like all politicians, is simply attempting to exploit anxiety.  The difference between him and others is that he's quite good at it. 

[angus]

I'm not sure that The Donald ever suggested that the US isn't great, and in any case the term is relative.  (For example, ten is great compared to five, but small compared to twenty.) 

His campaign slogan was 'Make America Great Again'... which implies heavily it was and isn't any longer.

That is spin, for sure.  "Win the superbowl again" might mean that a team hasn't won it in 20 years and it's time for a return to long-lost glory, or it mean that the team just won last year, and wants to win again.  It's all in the spin.  The Donald is actually very good at this.  For example, he once said that Obama was responsible for ISIS, then when he was questioned about it, he said, "they can't take a joke" or something like that.  Later, when he was interviewed by an anti-obama source he brought it up again, presumably meaning it and not joking.

But yeah, we aren't as great as we once were, as I described above, if you want to look at percentages.  It's all a matter of how you look at it.  Trump knows that.  His suggestion was only that it could be great again.  (FWIW, the USA will not ever be so great as it was in his youth, at least not in terms of its power to control the world economy, and I suspect that he knows that as well. )

[angus]

Greatness should be measured in absolute terms, not relative.

That's just silly.  I'm no trump supporter, but you cannot honestly believe that.  Is five a great number?  Well, in a vacuum we can't say.   Compared to two it's great, but compared to nine is is not.

Is 1000 great?  Well, if it is the number of dollars I receive each day as renumeration for my labors then yes, it is indeed great.  If, on the other hand, it is the number of dollars I receive each month, then no it is not great.

A year ago we could say "No woman has ever been nominated by the Democrats or Republicans for president."  Today we can say, "the only woman ever nominated by a major party was so narcissistic and so untrustworthy that even a greedy, unethical businessman accused of sexual harassment, bigotry, and fraud defeated her, winning several states that Democrats have not lost in a generation."  This is not a bigger situation, and it is not a better situation.

Your argument has so many holes in it you should market it as a sieve.

[angus]

You're attempting reduction to the absurd.  I appreciate the effort, but it misses the point.  I am not advocating a "zero-sum game."  As I stated in my original post, our aggregate GDP has increased.  It's just that those of developing nation have increased faster.  Capitalism is very fashionable now, even in Communist China.  It's a positive-sum game, to be sure, so long as it sustains itself.

[angus]

But it doesn't.  True, there were once great empires in Africa, South America, East Asia, the Indus River valley, and so on.  And it is also true that they were "reduced to rubble" long ago, long before the USA existed, and those societies were in that rubble state in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when the US was an expanding empire.  But since then all our products have grown.  It is not zero sum.  It is a positive sum for everyone, with a few notable exceptions.  For most societies, GDP(final) minus GDP(initial) is positive, therefore the sum of all those differences must be positive.  There is no assumption of a zero-sum game!  At least not on my part.  

It's just that our share of global influence, since the heady days of the Cold War, has decreased.  Again, our absolute influence has not decreased, but our relative influence, where it is measured as a ratio, has.  This, by the way, is not necessarily a bad thing.  I'm not really a fan of being the World Police, nor am I a big fan of bailing out every failed state.  There are many Trump campaign promises that he's clearly not going to keep faithful, such as siccing the legal system on Hillary Clinton and reneging on the climate accords and reversing Obama's course toward a trans-pacific partnership, and I'm glad about that.  I didn't expect, and wouldn't want, him to keep those promises.  I'm also hoping that he'll drop the Mexican border wall idea.  I suspect that he will.

Rather than make us great again, I think it might be more prudent to Make America Whole Again.  One campaign promise that I hope he keeps is the infrastructure investment.  I don't care whether you call that "making us great" or "making us whole" or "taking us back to a previous era when people were more concerned with big social investment projects" but whatever you want to call it, our crumbling bridges, sidewalks, highways, and transit systems need a little tender love and care.