Alissa Quart’s ‘Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream’

Divided we fall.

There’s only one week left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Steinbeck never said that Americans see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” but that misquotation is so pervasive because it captures something vital about one version of the American Dream, the idea that anyone can make it in America by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, which means that if you haven’t made it, it’s because of some defect within you, and not because of a rigged system:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed

In Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Alissa Quart — director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project — addresses the meritocratic delusion of the “self-made man,” the story that, in America, the rich are good, and therefore the good are rich, and therefore the dwindling slice of the pie shared among everyone else is no more than they deserve: