What is MAGA, actually?

The program behind the moves

Read one at a time, the policies of the past two years look like a list: tariffs, a closed border, a strategy for the Western Hemisphere, a defense of the dollar. Read together, they are the oldest economic program in American history. Make America Great Again is the slogan. The American System is the program.

In December 1791 Alexander Hamilton sent Congress his Report on Manufactures, which argued that the independence and security of a country are bound up with its ability to make what it needs.¹ In 1824 Henry Clay gave the program its name, the American System: tariffs to build home industry, a national bank to supply credit, roads and canals to bind the country into one market.² Lincoln's Congress enacted it. Between 1861 and 1863 the 37th Congress raised the tariff, chartered the Pacific railroad, founded the land-grant colleges, created the national banking system, and passed the Homestead Act.³

The rival program was the British System of free trade. It asked what was cheapest to buy. The American System asked what a free country must be able to make. This site's companion, The New American System, reads the present administration's moves as that program revived, and follows each pillar as it is built.

Four pillars, going up

Build it here. In February the Supreme Court held, six to three, that the emergency-powers law behind the 2025 tariffs does not authorize tariffs at all;⁴ the administration has been rebuilding them on the national-security and unfair-trade statutes Congress wrote for the job. In September the President announced a $15 billion steel complex in Lee County, Iowa, designed to make ten million tons a year from Minnesota iron ore.⁵

Protect the wage. In October the Labor Department suspended eight companies, Microsoft among them, from the labor-certification program that is the first step to an employer-sponsored green card, while it investigates alleged visa fraud.⁶ The premise is the free-labor principle Lincoln's party ran on: work is paid what it is worth, not what the cheapest substitute will take.

Secure the hemisphere. The National Security Strategy of December 2025 added a "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine: outside rivals are not to control the ports, energy and communications of the Americas.⁷

Secure the dollar. The stablecoin law signed in July 2025 requires dollar stablecoins to be backed by liquid assets such as dollars and short-term Treasury bills, so a new kind of money spreads the dollar instead of competing with it.⁸

These four act on the conditions around a company: the industries it competes in, the wages it must pay, the energy it buys, the currency it is paid in. The record on each, with a scorecard and the case against, is kept at newamericansystem.org.

The pillar Lincoln added

Clay's system had three pillars. Lincoln's Congress added a fourth that the other three could not do without, and it was not a tariff. The Homestead Act of May 20, 1862 offered 160 acres of public land to a settler who would live on it and work it for five years. About 1.6 million households proved their claims, and some 270 million acres, about a tenth of the country, passed to them.⁹

The tariff built the industry, the railroad bound the market, and the banks supplied the credit. The Homestead Act decided who would own what the system made valuable: the family that worked the land, not the buyer who could pay the most for it. Lincoln's Congress did not assume the gains would reach the household. It passed a law to see that they did.

The pillar not yet built

In 1862 the thing worth owning was land. Today it is the productive enterprise, and the household's share of it has been separated from the household. Most Americans who own stock own it through a fund that votes for them. Executive pay is set by boards the executives help choose. The gains from rising productivity go where those rules send them.

From 1978 to 2025, productivity rose 86 percent, the typical worker's pay 28 percent, and realized chief-executive pay 1,316 percent. The ratio of chief-executive to worker pay was 21 to one in 1965 and 325 to one in 2025.¹⁰

Tariffs can decide where a factory is built. They cannot decide who keeps what it earns. A rebuilt economy that sends its gains where the last forty years sent them will have rebuilt the factories and not the households.

The fifth pillar

Keep it in the household. This site, the Commonwealth Project, is that pillar's legislative arm: three draft reforms, grounded in property rights and in duties the law already recognizes.

Corporate Ownership returns the vote to the people whose money owns the shares, gives owners who stay more weight on executive pay and buybacks, and seats directors elected by the workforce on the board. Executive Pay lets the pay a company sets at the top, without its owners' approval, rise only as pay in the middle rises: a ladder, not a cap. The Utah Pilot lets companies take up the model voluntarily under state law, with a plan for sharing productivity gains with the people who produce them, so the model is tested in practice and the results are published either way.

The homestead of this century is not 160 acres. It is a share in the enterprise and a voice in how it is run, for the household whose work makes it productive.

Two sites, one program

The New American System follows the first four pillars as they are built. The Commonwealth Project is the fifth: the argument, the numbers, and the three drafts. This Articles section takes one question at a time, answered from the record; the next asks who votes the shares in a 401(k).

The first four pillars decide what America makes. The fifth decides who owns it.