A brief appreciation of MAGA as a slogan


@badjin_rank tweets, People in general are much more likely to be influenced by a slogan than facts. It is the entire basis of modern advertising techniques.

I agree thusly: 

"Make America Great Again" had great assonance and rhythm. You've got a double-M sound and a double-G sound with the second instance of each tucked behind a nice open A vowel. It just rolls out of the mouth and into the ear nicely. The convenient acronym was likely a happy bonus.

It's easy to see why MAGA has so many copycats. Unfortunately, Keep America Great, like many sequels, fails to appreciate, let alone capture, what made the original so magical. All the tonal and rhythmic energy is lost and KAG is an unfortunate acronym.

Against KAG, the very blunt, plosive alliteration of "Build Back Better" (which seems like an overt nod to the Better Business Bureau) seems almost poetic in comparison. It's not poetic. "Buh buh buh" is, at best, a baby sound, at worst, a mocking refrain aimed at dullards.


@extremecompute replies to OP, Like "Make America Great Again"? 😉

To which I reply:

The thing about slogans is that, although they are a shortcut to persuasion, they still carry a semantic payload. "Make America Great Again" generated a swarm of leftists proclaiming "America was never great!" Not a good look.

@extremecompute: It also begged the question "When did America stop being great?"

Me: The rejoinders write themselves.


UPDATE

@jhc131 asks, What would have been a better slogan for 2020? MAGAA was kind of funny but too tongue in cheek.

"Promises Made, Promises Kept" was a lesser slogan that should've been front-lined. It has nice, clear parallelism and rhythmic parity. Semantically, it has a bit of an in-your-face quality in a political context.

While the obvious downside is that it invites people to point out broken promises, which could suppress base support, it has the equivalent upside of energizing the base with a rallying point to highlight promises that were kept.

The less obvious downside is it sounds somewhat like "promises, promises" which is how people dismiss empty promises. The upside on that, however, is that it still calls to mind the actual slogan, and it's a less obvious attack.

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