Boot Trapped

 “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream” by Alissa Quart, 2023

Quart is a colleague of the late Barbara Ehrenreich, focused on poverty and the attitudes towards poor workers. This book is a partly enjoyable tour through the origination and development of the U.S. 'pull yourself up by your bootstrap' ethos; the 'self-made' man; the pioneer; the individualist. Quart ignores the materialist root of the bootstrap ethos in small and large scale capitalism, as if it is just an 'idea' floating above social production. The flip side of this ethos is a moralistic hatred of poor workers and anyone who struggles, as best verbalized by the Republican Party. Her main purpose in this book is to confront this hatred. Quart is a Sander's Democrat and does not pinion the Democrats' role in promoting meritocracy, which is a sophisticated name for 'bootstrapping.' In fact she doesn't even use the word meritocracy.

As most know by now, the origin of the phrase 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' is sarcastic, as it is impossible to pull your whole self 'up' by pulling on the straps at the side of one or a pair of boots. You might be able to get one boot up one leg, but that is it. This phrase has become like the game Monopoly©, which originated as an attack on real estate speculation, only to become a celebration of it.

The HEROES of BOOTSTRAPPING

Quart takes apart the 'self-reliant' mythology of the American transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson was wealthy via his dead wife's money. He hired Thoreau to do various jobs, so they were not out scrabbling for mushrooms in the woods. They both had a large circle of gentlemen friends – some regularly visited Thoreau at his shack on Walden Pond, a short walk from Concord. They were in no sense 'alone' – just petit-bourgeois intellectuals promoting themselves. Emerson was especially vile in defense of self-reliance, saying giving a dollar to a poor man was 'wicked' and called philanthropists 'foolish.' “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its (individual) members.” Emerson considered dependent people to be mediocrities. This while he depended on a dutiful wife, a bond servant, his collaborators at the Dial and even his help-mate Thoreau, who he cruelly made fun of at his funeral.

THE WILDERS

However Quart's arrow misses the mark on the Little House on the Prairie book series, an account of European pioneers in Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota. Quart accurately points out that the 'guvmint' Homested Act, a massive government giveaway of native land, allowed the Wilder's to make a life. She knows that some of the books' references to native Americans are backward. But she pretends that the books celebrate hardy individualism and nothing else. The Wilders worked with their neighbors; Laura went to school, played with friends and later became a school teacher; the family went into town on a regular basis, including church. This is a normal rural life, which Quart might be unfamiliar with.

Her main negative facts seem to come from Laura's daughter, Rose, who used the books to launch a TV series and was a libertarian right-winger. Quart says Wilder 'hated taxes,' but has no proof of a disdain for FDR, though that may be true. The problem is, like many works of art, the book series means many things to readers – it is a history, a family story, a children's book, a romanticized, sepia-toned look at European pioneer life in the west. It is not just a paen to 'rugged individualism' - and perhaps not even that.

ALGER

The Horatio Alger story is still with us – 'rags to riches.' With pluck and tenacity you too will succeed. Even in 1946 newspapers insisted that the guvmint GI Bill was part of a Horatio Alger story ... which it was not. As Quart points out, Alger wrote voluminous YA fiction during the late 1800s that always had a well-off older man help a young urchin find wealth. So the boys were not 'self-made' or only relying on hard work. The hidden side of this is that Alger, a son of a preacher and himself a parson, molested 2 young boys in his church and was fired for it. He later befriended young street kids in New York, basing his many stories on them. He gave them money and food, took them to his home and two he adopted. But what he did with these poor kids in private, no one knows. So, a very creepy back story to this 'American' myth.

RAND

Then we come to the rabid anti-communist Ayn Rand, a libertarian hero of the Right, a child of Russian privilege. Many noxious internet billionaires love her dreadful pot-boiler books – NASDAQs Travis Kalanick, Uber/Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel; Twitter's Jack Dorsey (who has now morphed into Elon Musk); Apple's Steve Jobs; Whole Foods' John Mackey; Lulumon's Chip Wilson; investor Mark Cuban; and Federal Reserve fuck-up Alan Greenspan. Thatcher agreed with Rand when she said “there's no such thing as society.” Really Maggie?

Quart discusses these billionaires' “rich fictions” of 'the makers' who claim they built businesses completely on their own and the attendant fabrications of girl-boss feminism. As an example, fake self-made man Trump was propped up by a rich father, and played the banking, legal and political system as part of New York's elite. This explains why he's still never been convicted of anything, even though he's a serial lawbreaker. While surveys and Piketty say that 60% of the Forbes 400 inherited their wealth, that is ignored by many fans of the meritocracy.

VARIETIES of ME

The last chapters of the book address familiar territory. Quart believes that some people tolerate the rich because of the “just world hypothesis” which posits the social structure can't be wrong. She interviews Trump supporters who are under economic strain and reject the upper-middle class angle of so many Democratic politicians, especially one failing farmer. The pandemic played a huge role in damaging many small businesses like his and they are the main voting base of the Republican Party. She looks into corporate mindfulness and “zen incorporated” methods as a solipsistic way to pacify employees and make their individual attitude the real issue. She looks at the “dystopian social safety net” of GoFundMe - an extension of the failed charity system. The majority of pleas on GoFundMe are for medical expenses – logical in a country without socialized medicine. She interviews mothers about the glaring absence of affordable or free day care, an insult to workers and their children. She dissects the inadequacies of side-gigs, side hustles and app-driven temp jobs; Instacart, Uber and Uber Eats, Lyft, Task Rabbit and the glory of two jobs, or one long, crappy one.

She has chapters highlighting billionaires who want to pay real taxes, or help those less fortunate own their own trailer homes. Some are part of an organization called 'Patriotic Millionaires.' For the working classes, she supports mutual aid, volunteering and worker ownership, but mentions nothing about the labor movement, political action, capitalism or socialism. While exposing the 'American Dream' as a con, she substitutes a cuddly liberal version of it. 

Throughout the whole book there is a philosophic rub: The individual and society interrelate; neither is dominant at every moment. Certainly the myth that humans are totally self-reliant is an obvious joke; but neither are they only automatons of society, though its influence might play the predominant role in the end. This, like many simple dualisms, is false. Opposites actually interpenetrate, even if one eventually dominates.

Her method of mainly focusing on thought substitutes for a materialist look, as capitalism molds behavior. Rabid individualism is a success strategy for some in a competitive capitalist marketplace, or a survival strategy. It is also a natural fact, as we survive, get sick, are injured and die as separate, physical individuals. We must remember that one reason Marx celebrates socialism is that it will release the creativity and energy of every individual – made possible by the social context of reduced labor time and the provision of all social needs. Quart is a pro-Sanders Democrat with some valuable research. Her best is in the cultural analyses at the beginning of the book, but the book still fails to actually liberate anyone from 'the American Dream.'

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Mean Girl - Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,” “Rich People Things,” “3%” “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality,” “The Ego and Its Hyperstate,” “Winners Take All,” “The Happiness Industry – How the Government and Big Business Sold Us on Well-Being,” “Psychology and Capitalism: The Manipulation of Mind,” “Keywords – the New Language of Capitalism.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 6, 2023