MAGA promised to make America great again. Voters wanted to make life affordable again. The midterm verdict exposed the distance between these ambitions.
Voters heard Americans First; MAGA promised America First. Only a few letters separate the slogans, but a monumental question divides them: what is national greatness worth if citizens cannot afford an ordinary life?
One slogan puts the state first; the other puts its citizens first. But even Americans First leaves one question unanswered.
America contains billionaires, professionals, and middle-class workers. So which Americans were served by MAGA?
MAGA's policy choices gave the answer.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 2025 tax-and-spending law will increase resources for households towards the top while reducing them towards the bottom. A movement built on the promise to remember forgotten Americans enacted legislation expected to leave some of the poorest behind.
Beneath these policies lies the familiar promise of trickle-down prosperity: reward investment and enterprise at the top, and the gains will spread to the bottom.
The first half has repeatedly delivered fortunes measured in hundreds of billions. The second has proved far less reliable: prosperity grew, but ordinary households captured a shrinking share.
The middle-class squeeze began decades before MAGA. The movement inherited it, and its policies extend the same bet rather than reverse it.
The share of Americans living in middle-income households fell from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023, while their share of household income declined from 62% in 1970 to 43% in 2022. America's economy became increasingly K-shaped: prosperity accumulated faster at the top, while households further down struggled to keep pace.
MAGA promised to help average Americans, yet its "big beautiful bill" again places faith in rewarding those at the top. The familiar promise of prosperity at the top spreading downwards arrived in new nationalist packaging.
This contradiction extended beyond economics. Americans asking for relief watched their country go to war with Iran, and many asked whether Washington was serving American interests or Israel's.
Supporting an ally is one thing, adopting its priorities is another.
Voters deserved an explanation: How did this war serve them? The question sharpened as households bore the cost of military action while paying more at the pump.
Progressives recognised this opening. Sanders and allied politicians challenged Washington's deference to Israel and the influence of big money in American politics.
Their criticism connected foreign policy with economics: When wealthy donors and powerful lobbying groups gain privileged access, then whose interests come first? The people funding campaigns or the citizens casting ballots?
Progressives differ on the remedies, but affordability gives them a common rallying point. Across healthcare, housing, wages, and taxation, their central promise is to make ordinary Americans' lives affordable.
Their affordability programme includes cheaper medicines, childcare support, more homes, and restrictions on corporate pricing abuses. These proposals move the argument from celebrating America's economic and military strength to improving ordinary Americans' lives.
For progressives, putting Americans first also means challenging their own party's priorities.
Critics within the party argued that establishment Democrats gave cultural causes, from racial justice to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, more attention than the financial pressures facing households. Progressives seek to shift that emphasis towards economic well-being.
A voter can support equality and still demand an answer about rent.
But putting household economics at the centre is a promise, not a result. Delivering it now requires progressives to confront three tests.
First, tax the wealthy. But collecting more revenue does not automatically make life affordable. If the additional tax dollars merely plug the annual fiscal deficit, families may see little immediate relief.
Second, raise wages. But a bigger pay cheque delivers little relief if increased prices swallow the increase. When higher wages drive demand beyond the supply of goods and services, rising prices can swallow the gain.
Unless productivity, supply, or lower profit margins accommodate the increase, the promise of better pay risks becoming another disappointment.
Third, restrain prices. Government intervention in pricing invites accusations of imposing a command economy, even though regulating a market is different from abolishing it. The free-market promise was that prosperity at the top would trickle down.
But spreading prosperity requires more than waiting for it to happen. Progressives are demanding action to fulfil the second half of that promise through measures such as negotiated medicine prices, utility regulation, and restrictions on corporate pricing abuses.
But here the economic battle becomes openly political.
American politics still carries the ideological baggage of the Cold War. McCarthyism weaponised accusations of communist allegiance, that legacy gives opponents a familiar way to attack redistribution as a threat to capitalism.
Progressives face this suspicion even though their economic programme is more ideologically aligned with social democracy, which is closer to capitalism than communism. The labels can obscure that distinction. Regulating capitalism is not the same thing as abolishing it.
Progressives therefore face a battle on three fronts
Economically, they must confront powerful interests that benefit from the existing distribution of prosperity. Politically, they must win support against resistance from MAGA, traditional Republicans and establishment Democrats.
Culturally, they must challenge the inherited suspicion that regulating markets or redistributing wealth amounts to communism.
Winning creates an opening; changing the economic settlement requires winning all three battles.
A Democratic congressional victory has not handed progressives control of their party, let alone the presidency. They must build majorities within a divided Democratic coalition while facing a Republican president with veto power.
Their promises now confront the distance between winning an argument and possessing the power to act on it.
Progressives have an opening, but voters have offered no guarantee of patience. Democrats faced rejection in 2024, Republicans have faced it now.
Progressives should read that sequence as a warning, not an inheritance. The frustration that creates an opportunity can also destroy it when promises fail to reach the household budget; MAGA just found it.
America First won attention.
Americans First raises the harder obligation: when will prosperity arrive, and who will receive it?
By the presidential election of 2028, progressives will have to show what they delivered, what they fought for and who stood in their way. Americans will judge whether Americans First became more than another slogan.
About the Author: Waqas M Awan is a Luxembourg-based corporate professional and the author of Power of Sage: An Anti-thesis to Machiavellian Prince. He holds an MBA and an LLM and has held senior finance roles at S&P 500 companies and Big4. He writes on economics, geopolitics, and power systems.
