BY ALISSA QUART
NATION
THE CLASSIC LEATHER BOOT HAS HAD MANY NAMES over the years—lace-up, cowboy, congress, pale rider. To get your work boots on your feet 200 or so years ago, you would stand up and grab two small leather flaps on the sides, known as bootstraps, and pull the boot up. From this everyday activity, the idiom “to pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was born—and with it, a torturous myth that true success meant getting ahead on only your energy and steam, without help from your family, government, or community. While it was initially understood to be an absurdity, over time it became a phrase that millions of people take seriously. The phrase is now, arguably, the basis of the American Dream and its embrace of an individualism that shades into a brittle self-sufficiency.
For years, I have been struck by how much the self-made myth shapes public opinion and policy. As a reporter focused on inequality, I frequently see this relentless individualistic stance, even in the messages I receive from readers about how the poor are responsible for their own scarcity, strangers wagging their proverbial fingers at “single mothers” or people who’ve been evicted. They are following decades of instructions that Americans have to accomplish everything on our own, from poor women being called “welfare queens” during the Reagan era to today’s Republican politicians opposing college-debt relief as “a debt-transfer scam.”
But there is also a very different version of the American Dream from this one. It’s closer to what was first imagined by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book on the subject—more inclusive, more communitarian, and less singular. It’s catching on. You can see it in the rise in the number of people joining—or attempting to create—new unions, and in the range of citizens now helping decide the budgets of their local governments. These are just two examples of the new American Dreamers that taken together show that collective action and community-focused activity are growing in popularity.
Their numbers include people who are joining psychological subcultures that operate like mutual-aid networks of the mind, with what one practitioner called “survivor-centered and survivor-aware care.” Cissy White, one counselor in a kind of new peer-to-peer counseling community, was a trauma survivor herself. She led webinars during the pandemic, sharing memories of her extreme poverty and neglect as a child, including the father she knew living unhoused. But while all of this suffering could have hardened her
