Just something MAGA-people seem to have a hard time with sometimes. Probably not as much when Americans are speaking to themselves, but as a non-American, sometimes it’s challenging to get “those people” to admit that there is indeed anything wrong with the US. As in they won’t accept a single criticism, and will loudly proclaim “America is the greatest country in the world”, while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, which for me pretty explicitly means America isn’t great, if it has to be made to be such again.
Without expressing an opinion on it: some people believe that it is meant to say that America was greater during times when women and minorities were more oppressed than they are now.
My own interpretation at least in 2016 was always that it was meant to say that Obama was a weak leader in terms of foreign policy and that Trump would restore America’s place in the world to be stronger. This may have been my interpretation because I am not from the US and so mainly care about it because of its foreign, not domestic, policy.
That’s what the republicans tried to make people believe, because that’s more palatable to the public than the actual reason, which was that racists were mad about having a black president for 8 years who worked to make the lives of various minority groups better. It’s a zero-sum mindset and they think they suffered and got less while those ‘who don’t deserve it’ got free handouts, which has little to no basis in reality.
I think the reason why it’s so pervasive is that it taps into the romantic notion that things were better in the good old days, and people can overlay whatever meaning they wish.
The reality is that in the grand scheme of things, the world does get better over time. Most of human history consists of wars, plagues, famines, power struggles, authoritarian rule.
But occasionally some aspects of the world get worse, too. For example, the widespread introduction of cars was “human progress” in the sense of enabling everyone to be mobile; it led to environmental problems and degradation of quality of life for many people.