The Cost of Saying It Out Loud
There is something unnervingly familiar about the Department of Labor’s “Make America Skilled Again” campaign. Not because it reflects the country as it is, but because it reflects a version of America that never actually existed. The imagery is scrubbed clean. The workers are confident, strong without strain, untouched by instability. The families are composed and orderly.
When America did appear uniformly white, it was neither stable nor secure. Women hung laundry on makeshift lines raised with branches; the weight was lifted by hand, without pulleys or fixed hardware. Men came home from coal mines and factories with damaged bodies and shortened lives. What is being invoked here is not a lost reality but a constructed fiction.
America First politics did not originate as a populist slogan. It has a lineage. In the 1930s and early 1940s, “America First” was the language of isolationism, nativism, and racial hierarchy, most visibly embodied by Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee. It was a movement that opposed U.S. involvement in World War II while advancing ideas rooted in open antisemitism and the belief that America’s strength depended on preserving a white, Northern European core. Embedded in this worldview was eugenics—the belief that the nation’s future depended on protecting the genetic “quality” of its population, a logic that treated race, ability, and lineage as qualifications for belonging. Jews, immigrants, and internationalists were framed as destabilizing forces. The rhetoric was explicit about who belonged and who did not.
The Labor Department’s imagery is selective by design. It presents a narrow version of American identity—white, male, industrial, uncomplicated—as both representative and aspirational. The absence of the modern workforce is the point. The images are not meant to reflect reality. They are meant to suggest that economic anxiety can be resolved by cultural correction rather than structural change, and that “skills” are a matter of character rather than access, education, and training.
Modern America First rhetoric does not repeat this history verbatim, but it echoes its structure: an inward-facing nationalism, hostility to pluralism, and a vision of American identity defined by exclusion rather than citizenship.
Who is meant to see themselves here?
White male Americans do not resemble these posters either. They are aging out of physically demanding work. They are cycling through retraining programs with uneven outcomes. Their families do not conform to orderly visual narratives. Their lives are not slogans. They are negotiations—between wages and healthcare, between compliance and survival. The campaign’s failure is not only that it excludes. It is that it misrepresents. It replaces lived experience with marketing and calls it respect.
And still, people accept it.
The danger is not that propaganda exists. The danger is that it now operates openly within government messaging. Campaign language has merged with public policy. Nostalgia substitutes for analysis. Exclusion is framed as tradition.
This is not a workforce strategy. It is a narrative designed to pacify an audience promised restoration instead of repair.
History does not repeat itself precisely. But it does recognize a familiar tune when it hears one. And right now, the band is playing loudly, and too many people are mistaking the performance for reality.
The question is not whether we have seen this show before.
The question is whether we are still willing to applaud while it happens.