American Resentment

Americans embrace a remarkably oblique form of resentment, one expressed in a void of self-loathing.  For all our ballyhooed belief in the equality of opportunity, freedom, and justice – what we called the American Dream – too many have abandoned it all to cynicism and have awakened on the wrong side of that dream.  It isn’t equality that really matters, not even when measured against their own interests.  Rather it is a sense hierarchy, the absolute antithesis of the democratic values of equality, that defines this pathetic American resentment.  It also defines what passes as nationalism and populism in the twisted narrative conservative patriotism that threatens to undermine everything that the right claims to defend.

Consider this, those who want to make “America great again” are people who for the most part do not trouble over the most fortunate few who have amassed great wealth and privilege because they might be one in a million able to play a game well or perhaps the one in a million who was able to be born well.  Exceedingly large fortunes, fortunes made – and one might say taken – from the work and labor of millions, including themselves – the nationalists, the populists, the left-behind-salt-of-the-earth types – are of no concern, even as the elite who do benefit openly lie to them; nor is the tremendous privilege that comes with it, privilege that dismisses equality of opportunity, freedom, and justice – is of any concern.  No, Americans expressing our unique pathos of freedom instead resent the poor immigrant or the homeless mother who might dare ask for help.  Indeed, complaining about the poor asking for anything is a mark of American exceptionalism by the same people who would call any complaint about subsidies or tax cuts for the wealthy a blasphemy akin to treason.  Democracy corrupts the ignorant.

People who genuinely need help are the targets of resentment in the United States, not because they have so much, but because they might want something.  Our resentment seeks scapegoats. It reinforces – legitimizes – the hierarchy of injustice and inequality in our country.  And it is absolutely inconsistent with the values that were the founding principles of the American Dream, even if the past that initiated those values is blurred in a haze of myth and history and no one fully believes it anyway.