For years I’ve felt guilty about my use of online shopping. All those little packages coming from big Eastern cities, all the way across the continent, to be driven to my door by a harried little man in an overworked Honda. Surely that’s wasteful compared to me just going to the local bigbox outlet and buying it in person, right? Well, I recently had a thought that has me questioning that logic.
Over on TrustCafe, James Young was trying to make sense of the broken American system that is being twisted out of all recognizable shape by the current Republican regime. He asked simply, “How did my country get here?”
I replied with my own take on the question, and then realized that my answer fit perfectly into this new blog stream that I’ve been thinking about.
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How did the US end up with its MAGA problem? I’ve thought long and hard about this, and if I were trying to pinpoint a single systemic flaw that led them to where they are today, I would look closely at “the American Dream.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the belief that every person should have an equal chance of success, regardless of race, creed, sex, or the station of their birth. It’s a glorious ideal to strive for, and a noble sentiment upon which to build a society. But somewhere along the way, people stopped talking about it as an ideal, and started talking about it as an achieved fact; as a description of how the system works today.
And once you make that mistake, it becomes too easy to see other people’s hardship as a proof of their lack of character. If the system lets everybody win, then clearly those in need must not be working hard enough. And if their hardship is their own damned fault, then it’s too easy to also dismiss your responsibility for helping them any further. After all, you already did your part by contributing to this awesome place where everyone who works hard succeeds, so why should you pour further effort into helping the loser who obviously doesn’t want to work for their share?
The cult of The Dream also blinds you to the unpleasant consequences of success. Everyone’s focus gets pulled to the heroes who clawed their way to the top, and as you project your own hopes and aspirations onto their example, you have to willfully look away from all the clawed bodies they savaged during their climb. Eventually you stop noticing that, for one person to have a billion dollars, at least a thousand others have to lose everything. So billionaires are celebrated and the homeless are reviled.
Belief that The Dream is real distorts every aspect of American culture, turning it into a fun house mirror that reflects wealth and privilege from every direction and makes poverty invisible, even when it’s sitting on the bench beside you.
I think that’s how America got here.
