By Justin Grosslight

Journalist Alissa Quart is hardly the first on the left to lament the dark underbelly of American individualism.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream by Alissa Quart. Ecco, 288 pages, $32.

Most of us are well acquainted with the so-called “American Dream.” Its precise meaning may vary from person to person, but it comes down to the belief that, in this country, people can succeed by pulling themselves up “by their bootstraps.” Hard work and dedication will inevitably persevere.

But where did this notion come from, how did it become so deeply ingrained in the national ethos, and, most importantly, is it a healthy ideal? These are some of the questions Alissa Quart, award-winning journalist and executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, sets out to answer in her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. In her research, she discovered that the bootstrapping concept was first mentioned in an 1834 broadsheet. It was first interpreted literally and dismissed as a joke. The irony is that — though the “bootstrap” notion is taken seriously by many today — the metaphor remains as absurd now as it was then. Many individuals insist that they were self-made, ignoring (or hiding) the means or connections that helped to make them successful. Worse, the illusion of the “self-made man” is often used to undermine the public’s faith in the efficacy of the government’s social welfare programs. Quart undercuts the harmful delusion of the “bootstrap” in various ways. She focuses on how Americans are inevitably members of a number of interconnected communities: flourishing is not just a matter of will power, but cooperation. Joining our neighbors to better our communities is a meaningful way to enrich all of our lives.

Bootstrapped makes its argument over four different parts. In the first, Quart examines some key historical and literary figures associated with promulgating bootstrapping or self-reliance and discloses their hypocrisy. Regarding the Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Quart argues that both individualists relied on community engagement, but the latter was a beneficiary of great wealth and the assistance of a spouse to keep his home. Nor did author Laura Ingalls Wilder live the kind of self-made existence of the protagonists in her Little House on the Prairie series. Rather than having to struggle to survive, her family benefited immensely from the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave adult white men and their families 160 acres of Western land appropriated from Native Americans. Powerfully, Quart reveals that Horatio Alger, the prolific, best-selling author of rags-to-riches stories, was a pederast. She concludes that for him bootstrapping was less about a formula for success and more about “Alger’s own personal shame for his pedophilia and the trauma he inflicted on others.”

The book’s second part shows how individuals and corporations that perpetuate the bootstrapping myth (and related tropes and paradigms) end up keeping the underclass in its place. Quart adroitly articulates how many financially successful businessmen and “girlbosses” market “rich fictions” about themselves. These moguls often have inherited capital and have established networks at their disposal to grow their wealth. What’s more, they have the money to invest in paying lower taxes than their poorer contemporaries. Nabobs like Donald Trump have exploited this self-made myth and the general populace as part of their rise to power.

Unlike its analytical earlier chapters, the book’s second half is more descriptive and polemical, tied less closely to the bootstrapping narrative. Part three highlights individuals who are left behind because the United States government – embracing the illusion of a self-made life – minimizes its support for child-rearing mothers, day care, medical expenses, and other reasonable aids. Quart goes into how numerous Americans have turned to crowdfunding to pay medical expenses — for themselves, their friends, or their families — that should be subsidized by the government. Meanwhile, companies offering “side hustle” jobs in the gig economy often have not supported contract workers with benefits or COVID protections. Chapters in the volume’s fourth part serve up a potpourri of hopeful vignettes that illustrate how community efforts during the COVID pandemic undercut the mystique of self-sufficiency. Readers are introduced to “Patriotic Millionaires” who renounce their fortunes to assist communities, learn about worker ownership in business cooperatives, and see the added value of mutual aid. Quart also goes into new and pragmatic concepts in America that are succeeding in making communities more robust and inclusive, such as “participatory budgeting,” whereby community members are invited to attend local government meetings to choose how to spend part of the municipal budget. And there is now the growth of what’s called “inequality therapy,” mental health support that pairs traditional therapy assessments with an understanding of one’s history and socioeconomic position.

At first, Bootstrapped is a compelling read. Analytic but not academic, Quart engages thoughtfully with literary studies, social science research, and a motley crew of civic-minded interviewees. By supplying stories of ordinary Americans, Quart invites readers to reassess common sociohistorical assumptions and vivifies the virtues of community engagement through touching and relatable anecdotes. Less reliance on the self and greater interdependence on others will engender necessary social changes. Quart is fiercely progressive, and her book celebrates Senator Bernie Sanders’s “human infrastructure” efforts, California Representative Ro Khanna’s public championship of worker-owned cooperatives, and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s support of mutual aid and other left-leaning plans. The best remedy for America’s myth of the “self-made” man turns out to be a good dose of democratic socialism.

On second thought, however, sections of Bootstrapped left me unsettled. For example, Quart’s claim that “Thoreau’s life did not match his rhetoric of solitude and singular mastery” feels somewhat caricatured. Yes, Thoreau attended social gatherings, went into town, and received guests while writing Walden. He used Emerson’s library and tutored the thinker’s children. But unlike Emerson, Thoreau never married or bore children and lived off a relatively modest income. And while I agree with Quart’s claim, à la economist Robert Reich, that nearly 60% of American wealth is inherited, there must be some place for meritorious or driven individuals – a good 40 percent – to succeed. Surely, some of these would come from the underclass. A nonwhite, nonmale example would be African-American television mogul Oprah Winfrey, who grew up in a poor and abusive Mississippi family. She won a scholarship to Tennessee State University and became Tennessee’s first Black television correspondent at age nineteen before launching her acclaimed morning show in the ’80s. Another case in point: the late American businessman Sheldon Adelson, the son of a cab driver who slept on the floor of his family’s home in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Adelson learned about running a business from a paper route he began at age twelve before selling news ads, helping small businesses go public, hosting trade shows, and eventually becoming the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. Indeed, there is no paucity of triumphant counterexamples to those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, but Quart selects her cases to suit her argument.

Organizationally, Bootstrapped feels at times like an archipelago of self-contained episodes, and it does not help that Quart often repeats information in multiple places. Both chapters eight and ten, for example, cite the same 2020 Pew Research Center survey indicating that only 47 percent of Americans have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses. Further, Quart introduces “Patriotic Millionaires” in chapters five and eleven, making the latter presentation seem partially redundant. Her various critical discussions of Amazon – worker wage exploitation, capitalist mindfulness, employee strikes – span several chapters, which dilutes her condemnation of the company’s behavior. More critically, however, many of the book’s points will be familiar to readers in the know. Is it news that Donald Trump was not a self-made businessman? Or that Uber saved hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes by enlisting its drivers as contract workers instead of part time employees?

Author Alissa Quart.

Furthermore, Quart’s proposed bag of solutions to fixing the bootstrapping quagmire is lumpy. In true progressive fashion, Quart thinks the most obvious way of nourishing change would be to nurture government social programs. Most notably, this means expanding the American Rescue Plan with its $3600 tax credit per child and $15 billion to assist low-income families with childcare and COVID leave. (Arguably “the most left-leaning economic plan since the Great Society” of the ’60s.) Improvements would also include permanently trimming the byzantine recertification reviews for Medicaid seekers and potentially invasive interviews for individuals applying for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) services. Such action, of course, would be financed through “additional tax dollars” raised by way of a wealth tax, lowering the financial threshold on estate taxes, and levying excess profits taxes on corporations who receive above an 8% return on their capital (such excess profits taxes helped America fund two world wars). In addition, Quart proposes having educators and lawmakers disencourage a curriculum centered on individual drive, or “grit,” and that wealthy benefactors curb their promotion of causes that mainly augment their own status, organizations, or net worth. (This idea jibes well with Anand Giridharadas’s 2018 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.) These large-scale changes have real potential to engender change.

Quart’s more individualized solutions, however, seem downright pollyannaish. Her examples include seeking ways to give public credit to those who helped us along the way as well as strengthening our impulse to acknowledge our interdependence on friends and colleagues when it is due. (Don’t many American entertainment, academic, and government award winners do this in their acceptance speeches or printed acknowledgements already?) Quart tells readers that “there are other stories we can choose from” to supplant America’s bootstrapping myth. But, aside from suggesting a focus on pluralism, interdependence, or “fresh hybrid narratives,” she advances no concrete storyline that will challenge bootstrapping itself, which has been a powerful, long-lasting narrative.

Curiously, I find little here that evokes a profound progressive solution to mitigating America’s embrace of individualism. If Quart’s work represents a left-wing approach to the problem, then it is constructive to consider its conservative obverse: David Brooks’s 2019 book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. Much like Quart, Brooks believes that rampant selfishness is corroding America’s social fabric. Given his political bent, and the fact that his book was published before the COVID pandemic, Brooks avoids discussion of subjects like inequality therapy, mutual aid, and participatory budgeting – topics that in some way concern greater government engagement or the embrace of social inequity as a structural/political problem. But, like Quart, Brooks believes that the response to unfettered individualism should be an embrace of community: by focusing holistically on neighborhood commitment through caring actions and giving one’s community a common story, people can cultivate norms that combat selfish striving. Brooks even mentions scholar Angela Duckworth, the doyen of the “grit” movement, to reinforce his argument.

Quart is hardly the first on the left to lament the dark underbelly of American individualism. Recent work by Robert D. Putnam, Marc J. Dunkelman, Theda Skocpol, and others also underscores the value of community in an era of self-pursuit. Nor is the issue new: nearly forty years ago, sociologist Robert Bellah and colleagues lamented how individualism curbed collective action in their 1985 work Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. The book’s title is taken from a quotation by the nineteenth-century French diplomat and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose immensely popular Democracy in America has since become a cornerstone of sociological inquiry about America. In his work, Tocqueville warned that, although America fared better than most democratic nations, too much emphasis on the ego could lead to soft despotism. In a sense, serious concerns about the harm of hegemonic individualism are as old America’s bootstrapping myth itself.

I have long been a fan of Quart’s lapidary prose, incisive investigations, and gripping anecdotes. But compared to her earlier work, Bootstrapped comes off as partisan and superficial. Lacking in trenchant arguments and novel solutions, the writing smacks of japanned progressive polemic – especially in the latter half of the work. Still, there is plenty here to admire: particularly her historical analysis of bootstrapping and its poignant tales of what life was like for ordinary people during America’s COVID epidemic. For these reasons, the book is worth a read.

Justin Grosslight is an academic entrepreneur interested in examining relationships between science, society, and business. He has published academic articles in mathematics and history of science, book reviews on a wide range of topics, and several vocabulary development and test preparation books. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard, Justin currently resides in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam working as a consultant and mentor. He has traveled extensively throughout China and to all eleven Southeast Asian nations.He has traveled extensively through parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania.