(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Misguided Individualism is Destroying American Democracy [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-06
There are many reasons why our democracy, and democracy around the world, are in peril, but I want to focus today on one specific aspect that is close to uniquely applicable to the United States: our worship of individualism.
I was moved to this thought by this morning’s Letter from an American by the eminent historian Heather Cox Richardson: January 5, 2025 (OK, late last night’s). She was writing about letters left behind by Green Beret Master Sergeant Matthew Alan Livelsberger before he blew up his Tesla outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas:
Livelsberger’s notes reflect not reality but rather the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s: the idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends.
It is no accident, Richardson suggests, that this idea was heavily promoted by Ronald Reagan:
Ronald Reagan made that argument central to American political debate in the 1980s. Joining those who claimed that the modern American state was creeping toward communism, he warned that the federal government was the current problem in the nation. He championed a mythological American cowboy who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone. That cowboy myth arose after the Civil War, when former Confederates complained that federal protection of Black rights cost white tax dollars. They contrasted the “socialism” in Washington, D.C., with the western cowboys in the cattle industry, portraying the cowboys as hardworking white men who dominated the land and the peoples of the West and enforced the law themselves with principles and guns.
But the cowboy was not the beginning of the problem. It goes back to frontier days, to the “lone frontiersman” who made his own bullets (though not the rifle, which gets overlooked in this tale), shod his own horse, staked out his own land, protected his own family, and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps while he was at it. Then there’s Horatio Alger: The Myth of the American Dream:
The "rags to riches" stories that Horatio Alger Jr. wrote in the late nineteenth century helped Americans believe the myth that anyone could work hard and become a rich, "self-made man." His readers ignored the moral qualities of his heroes and instead focused on their success. This myth was important to the general population because as the United States became more corporate and industrialized, it became harder for people to control their fates.
(Something I just discovered about Alger; he was kicked out of his job as a minister for sexual misconduct with boys. Are we sensing a pattern here?)
The Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Mellons (not to mention Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan’s hero) all built on the myth of the businessman rising to great wealth purely on the strength of his will, his grit, his intellect — and in no way helped by the government. Remember this?
Dick Cheney, Republican nominee for vice president, balked at giving the government any credit for his success as chairman of Halliburton Co., saying in last night's [Oct. 5, 2000] debate ''the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.''
That’s the opening clip from this article: USA: Government Ties Helped Cheney and Halliburton Make Millions. (And of course, DINO Joe Lieberman didn’t challenge him on it.) And then there’s the furor that erupted when then-President Obama tried to make clear that nobody gets rich alone; they need government help and society’s help (but, unusually for Obama, he was clumsy about it): ‘You Didn’t Build That,’ Uncut and Unedited. Here’s another part of that speech where he spelled it out much better:
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
Obama had it right: individual success is important, but it’s equally important to recognize that individuals don’t succeed on their own, that they need the schools, the roads, the police and fire departments — and they have an obligation to support (ie, taxes) the institutions that did all that for them and continue to give them the ability to make more money.
But it’s more than taxes. It’s also regulation, which is how We the People expect our government to protect us from excesses and abuses, from adulterated medication to wage theft and child labor exploitation, to discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, etc.
Again, there are many reasons why these protections are under heavy and sustained attack. But I submit that one major factor is this misguided individualism that wants no interference in satisfying its greed, its egotism, whatever it wants and therefore feels entitled to. This ranges from Trump, who is perhaps the ultimate narcissistic individual, to Elon Musk, who wants to run the world by himself for his own glory and power.
This same misguided individualism also drives lesser mortals who need to superior to someone, whether it is White over Black, Christian over non-Christian (and variations of Christianity over all other variations), male over female, straight over gay, ad nauseum.
The last supremacy of this kind of individualism developed after the Civil War, flourished in the age of the robber barons, was sustained by Republican politicians well into the XX century until it all came crashing down in the Great Depression. FDR rescued us with the New Deal, Social Security, the FDIC, and other government measures — and he was reviled for it at the time by those who called him, quite tellingly, a "traitor to his class" for putting the welfare of society as a whole over the privileges of wealthy individuals. While the cast of characters has changed from time to time — we never even heard of Musk until a few years ago — the goal has remained the same: Strip the United States of anything that stands in their way, no matter what the harm that results.
That’s what we’re up against.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/6/2295472/-Misguided-Individualism-is-Destroying-American-Democracy?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
