The Power of a Political Slogan

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly - they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” - Aldous Huxley

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” - Rudyard Kipling

***First up, let's take emotion out of this: I am not in any way endorsing the Donald J. Trump presidency. And neither am I valourising the content of the message, I am valourising the form of the message from a copywriting perspective. I write a bit of copy now and then for a living and I'm interested in the power of words. It also goes without saying that my views are my own.***

I can't remember Hillary Clinton's election campaign slogan. I have no idea. It might be "I'm with her". I'm not sure. I saw that a lot but I'm not sure if that was the official slogan. But Donald J. Trump's slogan is seared into my mind. There were times when I blinked and I could see it in the darkness of my eyelids. Okay, that's a lie, but you get what I mean. It is perhaps the most powerful and memorable political slogan or tagline ever. Why? Because it is a syntactical and semantic masterpiece. Just four words convey a powerful, and in many ways a frightening, message, one that starts inclusively and ends with a divisive challenge. I'm not claiming four words caused one of the greatest electoral upsets in history, but the slogan has been used and adapted to the point of ubiquity, it underpinned the entire campaign; it was all over the news, like a barbed leitmotif. Whatever you think of Trump, of his election campaign, these four words, which I will analyse one by one, underpinned an extraordinary campaign that defeated everything Washington could throw at it. Word by word, here's why it is so powerful:

Make 

This is a directive verb, it's addressed directly to the beholder. It also empowers: it implies that you can verb something together, verb something to happen. (YOU can/will) Make America Great Again.

America

This places you in the bigger picture. The nation, the thing that is greater than the sum of its people. You are an American, you are part of it all and you can do something.

Great

This is the least interesting of the four words, a superlative. But it's as important. You can be part of something that is great. Great also means powerful, without the negative connotations.

Again

Now here's the crux of the whole sentence and Trump's campaign, delivered right at the end. "Again" is a shrill dog whistle that everybody gets, but especially white social conservatives of either Democratic or Republican persuasion: the implications are of course that America was great, back in the day, and it is no longer great. It perhaps stopped being great under Clinton, or maybe W. Bush, it is certainly no longer great under Obama's administration. But... remember the three preceding words? That can be fixed, and you can fix it. The 'again' is of course the contentious part - it's implicitly combative, it invites a with-us-or-against-us reaction and if you were to question if America ever was great, or assert that it is great now, you're locked in a long argument.

Okay. I just Googled Hillary's slogan and it was "Stronger Together". It's not bad but it's not compelling - it doesn't cut into the psyche like "Make America Great Again" does. Because it's not a directive, there's no verb, there's no superlative, merely a comparative adjective and there's nothing above and beyond the readers of the words like "America" is above and beyond any kind of given "Together", neither is it a challenge. So it's frankly not as powerful (I'm avoiding the word "good" here as a comparative - again, see how powerful words can be?).

And here's the twist: "Make America Great Again" isn't Trump's. It's not a new slogan, in fact it's pretty old. It was used by Ronald Reagan in 1980 as a response to stagflation: "Let's Make America Great Again" and by Bill Clinton in 1992 as a response to the recession of the late 1980s: "Together, Let's Make America Great Again". But there's something more visceral about Trump's use. Truncating it to the four words without the universal adverb Clinton used "Together" or the inclusive transitive verb Reagan used "Let's", makes it more the directive, more a direct address to the voter alone, more the challenge. And, of course, context is important: America is out of recession.

I don't want to cheapen the gravity of the situation, of everything that is at stake. The purpose here is to show the power of words. Words shape feeling, words can melt hearts, words can ultimately kill. Use them wisely.