The 10 Guiding Principles of MAGA

American  Thinker 

Back in 2010, after President Obama had been in office for a year, it was clear that America's political divisions had reached the boiling point.

I saw my country start to come apart at the seams.

The American schism was almost complete and it wasn't just a political schism of two political parties. The split was even more basic. My countrymen were now divided into two distinct groups. I am not speaking of Republicans and Democrats, but rather pragmatists and idealists.

Mr. Obama tapped into a basic human need – the need for hope. His brand of hope was not rooted in a belief in the Almighty – something the average American could hear every Sunday in church. His was packaged into a political philosophy that appealed to vast numbers of secular Americans, the disadvantaged and poor, and of course, the young who felt they had been ignored by politicians, big business, and to a large degree, the system that they had judged to be on the side of large powerful interests.

By virtue of his election as a minority person, Mr. Obama had fulfilled the first of his promises to Americans that if elected he would fundamentally transform the U.S.

His actual quote from a speech given in Columbia, Missouri on Oct. 30 in 2008 was: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America". And with his inauguration as America's 45th president a few months later, the path lay clear for him to implement his plan.

There was a problem, however; his election had revealed the extent of America's many divisions and not just the political one. He did, however, have the wind in his sails with 257 Democrats in Congress and 60 in the Senate, but two years later he lost 6 Senate seats and 63 Congressional seats.

Americans who had been motivated by his rhetoric to vote him into office woke up to the realities of his inability to govern and realized that the hope he promised them came at a price, and that price was the implementation of an unworkable ideology based on identity politics and the red herring of systemic racism.

Mr. Obama had squandered his political mandate to effect meaningful change(the second part of his "hope and change" mantra) in America. His failure emboldened America's pragmatists and in 2014, Democrats lost another 13 seats in the House and a staggering 9 seats in the Senate; this time losing them the Senate and completing a Republican takeover of Congress.

One could argue that the emergence of the MAGA ("Make America Great Again") movement was inevitable after Americans saw the failure of Obama's time in office. Americans had grown weary of speeches and empty promises and wanted action to fix their many problems, and they didn't believe Bill Clinton's wife was up to the job.

They chose a man who spoke to them at gut level without lofty poetic phrases. If anything, MAGA really should have been called MARA for "Make America Real Again". The movement Donald Trump created now espouses a few very basic principles that are shared by his followers. And if my European friends want to understand the MAGA movement then they had better understand the members' ideology. Here are ten of those guiding principles:

1. God is alive and His Ten Commandments are not mere suggestions.  

2. Every life is important and must be protected.

3. America's values and its Constitution are not works in progress.

4. Law, order and personal accountability are essential to a healthy democracy.

5. Individual rights are not subordinate to a collective's.

6. Citizens' rights trump those of the bureaucracy.

7. Parents are responsible for their children, and a successful family has both a father and a mother.

8. The right to speak one's mind is not subject to negotiation.

9. A person must be judged by his works and actions, not solely by his words.

10. Justice, implemented impartially, is the only thing guaranteeing equality.

Granted, there are other basic principles that MAGA proponents hold dear, but those are the top ten. Others include views on the size, scope and abuse of government, unrestrained power of the elite, judicial overreach, illegal immigration, the existence of only two biological sexes, the role of men and women in society. and more.       

If we have learned one thing over the last ten years, it is that ideology should only supplement practicality, not replace it.

After Donald Trump's loss of a second consecutive term in 2020, half of America transitioned back to its Obama days and breathed a sigh of relief that their man was back in charge.

What they found out very early on, however, was that their man was not a leader. President Joseph Biden was but a pale copy of his former partner in governance, Barack Obama.

Biden was not an orator, neither was he a believable straight-talker like his predecessor, Donald Trump. He was a visibly angry man and one that was swiftly approaching senility. He had no overarching vision for America, unlike Obama, and he lacked Obama's charisma. What he did have was his party's control over the House and the Senate. However, after two years, that total control vanished when Republicans gained control of the House with 222 votes.

In times past, after midterm elections, American presidents typically became less political and more pragmatic. This was not the case with Joe Biden and the Democrats. They amped up their rhetoric against Trump and MAGA and hoped that American voters would once again cast a historic vote, this time for a mixed-race woman as their president. Hope was once again on the ballot, but the MAGA movement had been steadily chipping away at the administration's handling of the economy, the Democrats' identity politics, and the general malaise that had been created by the realizations that the government was being managed by an ineffectual leader whose mental capacity and decision-making ability was questionable at best.

Americans' choice was simple if not extremely difficult for idealogues on the left to make. They could hire a manager who could bring the economy back on track, shrink the size of government, create opportunities for American workers and in general, "Make America Great Again" or risk everything with an unproven, lightweight politician whose main qualifications were rooted in identity politics.

Americans chose the manager, and they are now realizing after nearly one year since his election that not even he can magically turn the American economy around and solve the systemic problems that face Americans like rising healthcare costs, failing schools and the growing racial and wealth divide that, if left unchecked, can tear the country asunder.

It's time for Americans to circle their ideological and practical wagons around a few guiding principles and remove the labels that are attached to them. De-politicizing these principles and ascribing a different label to them such as "core American principles" is the only way to move forward in these dire, über-political times.