Earlier in this exceptionally loosely linked series, I lamented that the conditions that set up the great American resurgence of the early 1980s aren’t, largely, there in our society today.
I’ll return to the example of France. The French nation and people have a culture that goes back, in one form or another, to pre-Roman times, through Vercingetorix, Charles Martel, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, a phalanx of seminal authors and artists, and centuries of stories, mythical and historical, that helped define what “French” actually meant, to the world but especially to France.
The demographic bleeding-out of World War I caused a crisis in faith in that myth – a malaise, to borrow a term that’s come up in this series before, and most certainly will again. With nearly 10% of the population dead, wounded or missing. and much of the country’s heartland devastated, it’d be fair to say France had Les Bleus
Unlike France in 1940, America hasn’t been demoralized by a great military, demographic and spiritual catastrophe in its recent past (and remember – the end of World War 1 and the invasion of France were about as far apart as 9/11 and today). In the past 40 years, America vanquished its greatest foe to date without a (non-proxy) shot being fired, followed by the greatest expansion in wealth in history. America should be stoked.
But we’re kind of the opposite today.
Every rational, sane, intellectually honest American knows our history – like the history of every nation – is full of imperfections, things that modern mores reject. That’s true of every country ever – at least, the ones that evolve positively. And for the most part, with a few extremely notable exceptions, Western Civilization has done that for the past few hundred years. The notion of “progress” in the human condition was meaningless before Western Civilization as we know it today started evolving.
And so Western culture – especially American culture – developed its own myths and legends. It was the land of opportunity, and of equality.
No, not equal opportunity for everyone at every time – but that, too, has progressed. And generations of immigrants choosing American, and disproportionally succeeding at it, are evidence that the myths have not only some basis in truth, but are in fact not merely myths of facts of American life.
But the powers that be in our culture have been working to undercut those parts of our national mythology.
Equality? In 1987, a Gallup poll showed that about a third of black Americans thought racism was a driving force in American life. In 2015, that figure had doubled. Does anyone seriously think that America got twice as racist between 1990 and the third year of Barack Obama’s third time?
Even more toxically in the long run? The notion that we are a nation of equal opportunity is being pecked away at by a league of leftist intellectual lilliputians.
I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago (so you don’t have to), a show called Marketplace, a show that tries to talk about economics.
They were interviewing Alyssa Quart, a woman whose career seems to revolve around convincing Americans that there is no opportunity. She was flogging a book, Bootstrapped: A Self-Made Myth And The Dystopian Social Safety Net It Created.
And it’s exactly as cynical as you might think:
“Boots were really important in the 19th century,” Quart said in an interview with “Marketplace” host Reema Khrais. “If you’re wealthy, you had someone who could help you put them on. If you’re a working man, you were struggling to pull them up every day. So pulling yourself over your bootstraps became this symbol of getting ahead in this country all on your own steam.”
In her latest book, “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream,” Quart looks at how this symbol helped create what she calls the “dystopian social safety net.”
“If we have a country where the social welfare state is much more fragile than, say, other advanced industrialized countries,” said Quart, “you have people then relying on this ragtag network of nonprofits, volunteers, crowdfunding.”
Quart’s message is being spread on fertile ground, at least among Gen-Zs, who’ve grown up with the message that “Boomers” got all the money and left them the scraps (which, by the way, I also felt as an angry and under-employed GenXer just out of college).
Thing is, Quart made a good point – unintentionally, and in a way that indicts the modern Left’s sabotage of American culture. She endlessly belabors the lack of government insitutions to “support” the poor, which is the usual leftist twaddle. Because…
…of course the idea of dragging one’s self up, completely solo, “by one’s bootstraps” is rare to unheard of. Of course America had institutions that fostered that.
Family.
Church.
Communities – and by that, we’re talking social communities, not governments.
Which are the things Big Left has been aggressively demolishing.
So yeah – coming up by one’s bootstraps is hard. Never easier than in any other culture in history…
…but Big Left is going to change that.
What an a amazing article!
Exactly who believes that someone with terminal kidney disease should “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”?
The heart and origin of wokeness ain’t black, ain’t hispanic, ain’t male, ain’t democrat. It is the college educated professional women who dominate the administration of so many of our institutions and corporations and media.
It’s fairly obvious to me that for a country with diverse views and people to survive, it must be governed by moderates. It really all comes down to compromise. Giving a serious political voice to extremists on either side of the aisle leads to the mess we see today.
The good news is if you get away from the totally polarized political and media scene and avoid certain hotbeds of extremism you’ll find most Americans are moderates. Clearly we lean one way or the other but generally most of us are not at either ideological extreme. The problem is most of us are so busy with our lives we don’t have time to try to moderate the wackos. And, tbh, don’t want to be recipients of their bilious vitriol.
Excellent analysis Mitch. You hater.
Noticing the Left’s intentional destruction of personal responsibility and charitable institutions is racist, homophobic, transphobic, bigoted, sexist, what else did I forget? Bad. It’s bad.
If you’re wealthy, you had someone who could help you put [your boots] on
Say what? I have a lot of trouble with this whole bootstrap image and its importance to class. I don’t believe it. This sounds like (yet another) oh-so pat history like the ones told by historian Michael A. Bellesiles in “Arming America”.
rAT, stepping away from his work with the ER nurse squeaked: “It’s fairly obvious to me that for a country with diverse views and people to survive, it must be governed by moderates”
I got a better idea, rAT.
How about not having a diverse country? How about you, your degenerate friends, your savage, 80IQ black dependents, your uneducated, unskilled, 75IQ Guatamexidaorains, your mutlilated, mentally ill child molesters, your twisted, drug addicted adolescents…the whole fucking leftist circus stay on your side of the wire, and we civilized human beings will stay on ours.
That sounds like a great idea.
Western Civilization […] Western culture
You continue to amble around, like katten om den varme gryde, what Western Civilization, in fact, is. I went through the brainwashing in my childhood, but the evidence continues to pile on.
Is this article a joke?
The dystopian social safety net included several Alabama public school teachers who donated rare and precious time off . . .
Public school teachers in Alabama work 187 days/year.
OK, when someone says that “pull yourself up by the boostraps” is hopelessly outdated, I’m reminded of the jokes that when the riots came to the shoe stores, everything was stolen….except the work boots.
That noted, probably a better book on the breakdown of society would be Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, where Olasky notes that before government got into the act, charities did have “work tests” by which they differentiated the worthy poor from the lazy, and they did differentiate people with incapacitating diseases from those who were healthy.
I also was doing a bit of thinking on the subject as well, and my pickup sometimes gets invited to help people move (I come along to keep it company), and one thing I’ve noticed is that my truck rarely helps people move who have less stuff than I do. Lots of packaged foods, tons of (generally shoddy) furniture, and the like.
So if a poor person wants to pull himself up by the bootstraps, he often needs only to learn how to cook a healthy diet (take it easy on the ethnic comfort foods!), exercise, and use up the things that he already has. In the case of the person described in the article, he’s on dialysis and probably can’t ever recover kidney function without a transplant, but he can get blood pressure, diabetes, and his weight under control, and thus at least reduce his need for dialysis. In the picture I see in his GoFundMe, he clearly appears to need to lose about 100lbs.
One place where I agree with the author, though, is that Social Security disability can often work as a way of imprisoning the disabled. My sister-in-law is on it, and I’ve seen it wreak havoc on her and a lot of those around her. Darned Democrat program….
On another note, having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, one thing I remember very clearly was that back in those days, doing things for yourself was much more valued than it is today, from baking to car repair to making your own clothes, and people knew, if only from distant memory in high school home ec or shop, how to do them. I see a lot more learned helplessness these days, which probably explains a lot of the insistence that, with all the advances we’ve really had in many ways, insists that we’re in a ditch from which we cannot escape.
bike;
Funny, isn’t it? How many of your high school classmates took auto shop? When I took it in 71 & 72, we had full classes. Many of them wanted to learn how to perform at least basic maintenance on their cars, to save money. Guys like me, were looking to build the skills that my dad, a shade tree type mechanic, learned me. Then, the whole DIY home remodel/repair genre of TV shows, convinced a lot of people, including lots of single women, that they could handle projects. Back when I worked at Menards in the flooring department, our demonstrations of installing laminate, vinyl and even hardwood floors, were well attended. So, some people realized that pulling ones self up by the bootstraps, has many meanings.
Somewhere, back in the SITD archives, I have a post where I described, briefly, the history of welfare from the Middle Ages to the present.
The abbreviated version: In the Olden Days, welfare was the responsibility of the parish you were born into. If you were a woman who gave birth to a fatherless child, your neighbors, often near to starvation themselves, paid to raise your kid.
This system fell into chaos in the 18th and 19th century when the economy demanded mobile labor. People moved to find work, and when they fell on hard times,their “home parish” was supposed to support them. This was the origin of the workhouse system. Workhouses in Britain were supported by contributions from parishes, they were not government systems until near the end.
So in the mid to late 19th century welfare was gradually taken over by the state, first local governments, then the state.
The US system was a bit accelerated, since the country was growing and it as normal for people to have no particular “home parish.”
Until the New Deal, being on welfare was considered a failure on the part of individuals. The idea was that money given to people on welfare was money taken from people that were having a hard time getting by themselves.
The only people I know that actually think poor people should be allowed to starve to death or die in a frozen alleyway are hardcore Libertarians. Actually, I don’t know any of those, though I suppose there might be a few out there.
The controversy is about what control tax payers should have over people “on the dole.”
I think the people who say that they are “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” are chumps. You gonna let a woman have seven kids with no husband and no way to make a living and pay her t raise those kids? Don’t sound fiscally conservative to me. Ditto if you think junkies should have legal access to drugs. Keeping addictive drugs legal and cheap doesn’t solve your problem, there are people who will smash the windows on a dozen cars to get $5 worth of change so they can buy a fix.There are no socially responsible junkies.
It’s funny how people throw around the expression “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” without understanding the fact that it was coined as an ironic term, since it is physically impossible to lift yourself up by pulling up your boots.
We get a lot of snow where I spend the winter in Sawyer County. My next-door neighbor is a retired school teacher and when I am done plowing my driveway I work on plowing hers.
She is always grateful and I tell her “My mother lives a thousand miles away. I can’t help her. I am shovling your drive and hoping there will be someone else there who can help her when she needs it.”
At my mother’s funeral, I met the neighbor who actually used to shovel her drive. It was a powerful moment for me.
We should pay our taxes and fully fund Medicare, Medicare, Social Security, Child Protective Services, foster care, SNAP, and everthing else.
We should also do our part to help whoever we can while we can. It’s a big world and all we’ve got is each other.
God help anyone who depends on a shizoid internet troll for “help.”
Life is a team sport. A human being is simultaneously both an individual with rights and a member of society with responsibilities.
The Libertarian Dystopia we now live in was a lie that an actor told us 40 years ago, and some folks believed him.
“Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps” means that when someone offers you a strap, you put your foot in—and you push. The conservatives are half right on this one, and denying it just gets us caught up in silly “left-right” squabbles. Of course we should help them, but if they won’t help themselves too, the truth I’ve learned is I have to let them lie—and move on to the ones who will use my help.
^^Obviously never read the article.
That’s why he can’t point to a single point made in the article (unlike myself).
rAT Emery squeaked: “She is always grateful and I tell her “My mother lives a thousand miles away.”
Then he chirped: “At my mother’s funeral, I met the neighbor who actually used to shovel her drive. It was a powerful moment for me”
So, wait….you even lie to the non existent people that populate your lies, rAT?
Wew lads…Circles within circles in this degenerates empty head. 🤯
rAT lied: “We get a lot of snow where I spend the winter in Sawyer County…”
Right…at the SkI ShAcK, right, rAT?
Lmao…tell us rAT. Is the SkI ShACk big enough to get the Berkeley horse in there and still have enough room to get a good swing at the ER NuRsE”s ass?
tai rAT!
Ya know rAT…in hindsight it’s probably a blessing you lack the T to make sons… Otherwise you’d have to fight those young bucks off for a crack at the ER nUrSe at ‘the horse’.
That would be tough after shredding teh BirKEy.
Ya know rAT…in hindsight it’s probably a blessing you lack the T to make sons… Otherwise you’d have to fight those young turks off for a crack at the ER nUrSe at ‘the horse’.
That would be tough after shredding teh BirKEy.
Ya know rAT…in hindsight it’s probably a blessing you lack the T to make sons… Otherwise you’d have to challenge those young bucks off for a crack at the ER nUrSe at ‘the horse’.
That would be tough after shredding teh BirKEy.
Ya know rAT…in hindsight it’s probably a blessing you lack the T to make sons… Otherwise you’d have to fight those young bucks off for a shot at the ER nUrSe at the Berkeley horse.
That would be tough after shredding teh BirKEy.
Uh oh. Your protectorates are at it again, Bikebubble.
Where tf where you?? They count on you for cover!!?
https://twitter.com/CrimeWatchMpls/status/1649669020885434368
I have 5 different iterations of the same post in moderation. Have no clue…y’all will just have to deal.
What you see in the article is a category error. The author lists some problems people have, and identifies all of these problems as being a result of . . . insufficient socialism.
You can imagine a twin of the article where the same problems were identified and assigned to . . . insufficient capitalism.
This is actually out of step with current Leftism. Wokism explicitly rejects money and social class as the source of every problem in the world. It all goes back to white supremacy and sexism, not economic inequality. Economic inequality is a symptom of white supremacy and sexism, sez wokism. This makes wokism easier to peddle to the rich. All they have to repudiate is their privilege from being born white and/or male, they don’t have to repudiate the advantages of wealth & social class.
Oh yeah. Just as I thought. Allissa Quart, born 1972.
Being right all the time like this is a burden is bitter sweet for me.
“Life is a team sport. A human being is simultaneously both an individual with rights and a member of society with responsibilities.”
I hear this a lot from people who want something from me. It would be helpful if they could point me to a document that describes my rights and my redponsibilities.
I’m aware of the Constitution guarding my God given my rights but where do these responsibilities come from? Is it something I agreed to? Is it something you’re imposing on me? Something you’re imagining? What gives you the authority and the power to assign me responsibilities?
Let’s be in mind of a line from an old song. You can’t even run your own life, I’ll be d***** if you’ll run mine.
Apparently the “responsibilities” incurred by every individual do not include avoiding having children with no means to care for them and becoming addicted to drugs and/or alcohol that prevents you from providing for yourself.
If people avoided doing these things, crime & poverty would be reduced by, what? Ninety percent? Ninety-five percent?
21st century American capitalism: https://twitter.com/i/status/1649797909792137217
Two years in office, two embassies abandoned under fire. Also first major land war in Europe since WW2.
That’s why they call him “Slow Joe.”
What gives you the authority and the power to assign me responsibilities?
“Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen” There you go, Big.
Fascinating how all the countries where we saw a new era opening and where we invested copious amounts of money and time are descending into chaos one after the other a few years later. If you enjoyed Mali and Burkina kicking the French out or the Nobel Peace Prize-sponsored ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, you will love the Sudanese rebirth. Maybe there is a lesson to be learnt somewhere…
Most of us already know the lesson. America First.
Wasn’t that easy?
Yeah, it’s a total mystery why Sudan is falling apart. Sudan Cliff Notes (hint, the Bidens are involved)
Now they are saying that Biden will soon announce that he is running.
It would be interesting if Biden ran against Trump & lost. You would see a tidal of “L hate Biden” stories coming from the Left, as they would now feel free to criticize Slow Joe for what has been obvious to most Americans for over two years. The poor judgment, the steady advance of dementia, the China payoffs, the Afghan disaster, the war in Ukraine that he can neither win nor lose . . .
“Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps” means that when someone offers you a strap, you put your foot in—and you push. The conservatives are half right on this one, and denying it just gets us caught up in silly “left-right” squabbles. Of course we should help them, but if they won’t help themselves too, the truth I’ve learned is I have to let them lie—and move on to the ones who will use my help.
I’ve always preferred this: Picture you’ve fallen overboard of a big ship. The life preservers on the ship have a rope that coincidentally reaches only about half the distance from you to the safety of the ship. The conservative throws the life preserver to a point halfway between you and the ship. The progressive throws the life preserver the whole distance, but only because he threw you both ends.