A nation of hopeful idiots

Far be it from me to blame a fel­low nov­el­ist for our trou­bles, but Hor­a­tio Alger may have done Amer­ica more harm than good.

You’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with Alger’s legacy if not his work. He wrote over 270 dime nov­els in the nine­teenth cen­tury all based around a cen­tral theme: that in Amer­ica, any­one can become rich through hard work and ded­i­ca­tion. Alger was as respon­si­ble as any­one for the meme of the “rags to riches” can-​do Amer­i­can spirit that has become so cen­tral a part of our cul­ture that it influ­ences peo­ple to act against their own best interests.

A good exam­ple of an Alger story would be Barack Obama. Raised by a sin­gle mom and her working-​class par­ents, Obama has gone from food­stamps to the favorite to become the next Pres­i­dent of the United States. Obama him­self will tell you that his story is an Amer­i­can story, that things are pos­si­ble here that are pos­si­ble nearly nowhere else on Earth.

Pos­si­ble. Not nec­es­sar­ily probable.

See, that’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion. Just because some­one like Joe “The Plumber” Wurzel­bacher might be rich some­day doesn’t at all mean that he will be. In fact, he almost cer­tainly won’t be. Because the game is now stacked against him like it hasn’t been since the Guilded Age, the last cou­ple decades of the nine­teenth cen­tury dom­i­nated by rob­ber barons with names like Van­der­bilt and Astor. Today the rob­ber barons are called Exxon-​Mobil and Hal­ibur­ton, but the sit­u­a­tion is largely the same. There’s the rich, there’s every­one else, and very lit­tle way to get from the lat­ter to the former.

But that doesn’t deter most Amer­i­cans from vot­ing in favor of the rich, on the the­ory that they’ll be rich them­selves some­day. For the vast thun­der­ing major­ity of them, that never hap­pens, but in the mean­time we get increas­ingly regres­sive taxes (I’ve heard mid­dle class peo­ple who are damn well capa­ble of doing the math speak­ing out in favor of a flat tax as though it was actu­ally a good idea for them), health­care we can’t afford and ever ris­ing costs of liv­ing. Most Amer­i­cans have been duped into think­ing that they’ll be mil­lion­aires any day now, and then it’s fat cat city.

Which just goes to show you how far we’ve fallen. Mil­lion­aires are just barely rich any­more. The mid­dle class has been frozen in the $30-​90k range for most of my adult life. But let’s face it. If you’re only mak­ing $50,000 a year with a fam­ily to sup­port, you’re not mid­dle class any­more, you’re barely get­ting by. The rich are now multi-​billionaires, not pal­try mil­lion­aires, and they’re so far away from the rest of us that they may was well live in another coun­try, and in a very real way they do.

Don’t fall for the hype, peo­ple. You may do well for your­self, you may have a com­fort­able and pro­duc­tive life. But most of you will never, ever be finan­cially rich. So quit vot­ing to sup­port those who already are. Vote to help your­selves, right now, in your cur­rent cir­cum­stances. Or none of us is going anywhere.