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BY KIM SHINKOSKEY

I love the idea of making America great again. I just can’t see it happening the way today’s MAGA leader is doing it.

Do we make America great again by demonizing brown-skinned immigrants and secretly trying to make America white again? America was once great because we welcomed immigrants of all types and empowered people of color through our civil rights movement.

Do we make America great again by suppressing vaccines for schoolchildren? No, America became great in large part because she assured a 95% vaccine rate of the entire population to establish herd immunity and allow everybody’s children to live into adulthood, even those who never learned any biological science or who are suspicious of science in general.

Do we make America great again by subverting the Article 1 congressional legislative process that says, “Congress shall make all laws”? No, not at all. We let Congress do its work without presidential interference.

Do we make America great again by moving from an international position of being a friend to all peaceable nations to a position of being openly hostile to certain peaceable neighbors—places like Greenland, Canada, Panama and Mexico? No. George Washington taught America how to make America great when he counseled, “The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

Do we make America great again by withdrawing from NATO commitments? George Washington said, “Let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements.”

Do we make America great again by threatening to jail opposition political party members or by withdrawing their security details or their press credentials simply because they are doing their job? Not at any time in our history before today.

Do we make America great again by denigrating election workers, cozying up to communist dictators, hiring dozens of lawyers to endlessly delay court cases, not properly vetting Cabinet picks, assuring the people that God is on our party’s side, and holding up a Bible outside a church for a photo op? Not really.

Do we make America great again by constantly tooting our own horn and constantly denigrating anyone and everyone who disagrees with our own position? Actually, no.

All this feels more like making America a tyranny for the first time.

I was thinking the right way to make America great again is to negotiate quotas for immigration based on reasonable and depoliticized criteria; effectuate reasonable and equitable civil rights protections for all; honor religious freedom for Muslims in Gaza and other Middle East nations; prevent public health and education disasters by continuing to require vaccines for children and upgrading the public schools; turn lawmaking and spending back over to Congress so as to stick with, for example, congressional border legislation like that painstakingly negotiated not long ago; use term limits to ditch hyperpartisan politics and naked political ambition—things the Founding Fathers said are fatal for a republic—and honor the seven articles of our national Constitution; leave postwar Gaza to the Israelis, Palestinians and other Middle East nations to deal with; teach honest civics and history in public schools, including especially the wisdom of George Washington; and settle for 50 stars on our flag instead of 51, 52 or 53.

I was thinking the right way to make America great again is to compromise with opposition political party members, give all law-abiding press members access to press briefings, and accept lower court decisions except in cases of obvious national significance; bring civility and honor back to public service and purge criminal acts from government rather than law-abiding public servants; diminish the outlandish materialism that infuses American culture by dealing with false advertising, regulating today’s outrageous consumer interest rates, breaking up monopolies, and once again establishing progressive income taxation as opposed to regressive; and commit to religious freedom for all, not just evangelical Republicans … and the list goes on.

(Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of The American Kings: Growth in Presidential Power from George Washington to Barack Obama (2014).)