by Mary Elizabeth Williams from Salon.com
Thanks to his family's wealth, Donald Trump was already earning more annually when he was a toddler than many of us will ever dream of. Kylie Jenner grew up in a mansion. On television. Yet both have calculatedly peddled their images — like plenty of the born rich do — as industrious, self-made success stories. Why? Because America loves a good story of someone picking themselves up by their bootstraps. But it's all a myth. It's more than a myth — it's a joke.
In Alissa Quart's "Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream," the author of "Squeezed" and "Branded" explores the roots of our obsession with individualistic success; unpacks how it's helped give rise to everything from Trumpism, hustle culture and crowdfunding as ad hoc healthcare; and explains how the zeal for autonomy has undercut our humane impulse to interdependence.
Salon spoke to Quart recently via Zoom about how we got here, and how we might just be able to find a better way out — together. "Writing this has really changed me," she says. "I see myself as proud of the ways I'm dependent."
Before I read this, I had not understood the origins of the whole "bootstrap" platitude and how, actually, it was meant to be a joke. Talk to me about what "bootstrap" was supposed to initially mean.
It was a joke. It was an absurdity. There was a guy named Nimrod Murphrree, and he was being mocked. "Probably Mr. Murphrree has succeeded in handing himself over the Cumberland river, or a barn yard fence, by the straps of his boots." In 1834, this was seen as totally outlandish, and the bootstraps were a metaphor for this. In the Racine Advocate some ten years later, they said the governor must be trying to pull himself up by the bootstraps. Again, like a figure of fun, because you can't really pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
It was even used as sort of a metaphysical joke. Somebody wrote in the 1860s that the attempt of the mind to analyze itself is analogous to the one who would lift himself up by his own bootstraps. The mind cannot analyze itself. That, again, is equivalent of bootstraps. But over time, it becomes this thing that people are earnestly striving for. When you deconstruct a lot of these things, like the Horatio Alger story, it is not quite what people have thought. And he certainly wasn't who people thought.
Even the "American dream" meant something different in its earliest incarnation. When I look at these words, there's a real range of meanings. What is it about America that our symbols start as jokes, and then are taken deadly seriously and we use them to punish each other?
There's been this misrepresentation of phrases and of historical figures too. In some ways, that's how culture works. But I feel like the trend is to turn them into something that is punitively individualistic, and against fresh ideas and against multitudinousness and against minorities. It's not coincidental that the way they're bastardized and depleted serves certain interests. It's just not.
I think that's part of it with "bootstraps." You use that absurdity, and you deny its absurdity. I met someone who told me he'd grown up in Ohio, and said that all his teachers use the phrase bootstraps in public schools, just as a matter of course. "You're gonna have to get out there and pull yourself up by your bootstraps." This is what his history and his English teacher thought was inspiring. It wasn't just, like, the football coach. It's been a very normalized refrain.
In the book you brought up "Little House on the Prairie," which is a narrative that speaks very specifically to the ways in which bootstrapping looks different to girls, and from a very young age.
It's also kind of exclusionary. What's been interesting for me was reading some of these texts with these new eyes of what the assumptions around class and masculinity and power the reader was supposed to have. You're going to follow these people into self-sufficiency. And you're supposed to identify with Emerson, whom I had loved. I never followed Horatio Alger, but I had recognized that there was a pretzel-like shape that the reader was being asked to contort — especially a female reader — themselves to fit into the world and the Walden system.
And yet, absolutely, one of the foundational arcs in storytelling is this rags to riches hero's journey, where the the humble person is called to greatness. What's the difference?
Horatio Alger wrote over one hundred books, and they sold just millions upon millions, and they were all the story of this young man making it. He's a very handsome very young man who had been a busker or a peddler or a hat salesman or whatever. He meets a much older, wealthy man who saves him. That is the Marriage Plot. But that's not the Horatio Alger story. The Horatio Alger story as we're told is somebody who does it just by luck and pluck, hard work alone. That's the bootstraps. No, he allures an older man.
It's the Marriage Plot without the marriage, because it's homosocial. It's actually probably the way power works. It's more realistic. But it's not the Horatio Alger story. The sexuality and the nepotism and the sociality of the actual Horatio Alger story was really stark to me. These kids are not just making it by selling lots of ties. They're meeting an older guy and charming him with their beauty. It's definitely about this relationship.
So the claim then goes backwards that he actually is somehow making it by himself. We're making invisible perhaps, for heteronormative reasons, the relationship between the older man and the younger man.
One of the linchpins of the book is that it's not so much about what I can get. It's the fear of what I will lose.
Loss aversion is a theme throughout. This is true, obviously, of Trump supporters. This was written about in the aftermath of the Trump administration.
The average salary of a Trump supporter in 2016 was $72,000. The Trump supporters made a lot of more money than you'd imagine. The way I understood their fear was something called "loss aversion." The fear of losing money and status is twice as powerful as the joy from gaining something. These are not poor people. I think that explained a lot of the fixation on the self-made man. They wanted to align with that guy they think is rising, because they're so afraid of losing what they think is fragile. And they're not wrong. This is part of what I wrote about in the last book. Even at $72,000, they could be laid off. There's so little job protection.
"That helped me understand better, on a heart level, why people are obsessed with the self-made myth and with people like Trump."
They don't see it that way. They don't think that you need the loss of unionism is the problem, but it is partially, and they are more fragile. Their identification with somebody who they believe is strong and self-created gives them ballast. I really liked this chapter, particularly the Trump supporters, because I was trying to do justice to their fear. I didn't want to just demonize. There was a union guy, and he's talking about his co-workers who are all Trump supporters. You know, he loved them. They were his brothers. But he was also like, what has happened to them? What are they afraid of? Some have been they've been laid off and he's seen them cry about their job security. I thought that was poignant and interesting and helped me understand better, on a heart level, why people are obsessed with the self-made myth and with people like Trump.
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