In this op-ed, Rakeen Mabud, the director of the Roosevelt Institute’s 21st Century Economy and Race and Gender programs, joins Roosevelt Institute fellow Andrea Flynn to deconstruct the "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" myth of economic upward mobility.
Donald Trump was marketed to be the president of the “little guy,” a leader who would wrestle power from America’s elites and hand it back to ordinary Americans. When he accepted the Republican nomination, he proclaimed that he joined the political arena “so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves.” We are now more than six months into his presidency, and it’s clear those promises were empty. Instead of creating better opportunities for everyday Americans, he’s doubling down on the very economic rules that have been hurting them for decades, weaponizing the racialized American “bootstraps” narrative to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the majority.
Trump advertised himself as a different kind of leader, one who would “drain the swamp.” While his style may be a perverse departure from the traditional politicians he derided on the campaign trail, his agenda is characterized by selling a classic American mantra: In order to succeed, all one needs to do is work harder.
In this dangerous political moment, it’s time to call the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative what it is: a myth. Americans are poor neither because of a lack of hard work nor because people of color and immigrants are snatching opportunities from them. There are hurdles such as lawmakers often writing the rules of our economy to tilt the playing field in their and their donors’ favor, including everything from policies that weaken unions to those that give special tax treatment to corporations and the wealthy. These policies, and not the lack of effort of individual workers, are the real reasons that people are struggling to make ends meet.
Conservative lawmakers have long been selling the misleading notion that Americans can change their destinies simply by working themselves to the bone, distracting from the structural forces that make economic upward mobility extremely difficult. But the truth is that in America today, hard work can get most people only so far. In fact, those who are working hardest have fallen behind the fastest. These days, working as a home health aide, a restaurant worker, or in any minimum-wage job is not a gateway to the middle class. According to some reports, a quarter of all individuals living in poverty are working or seeking work, and in many states, people working full time at minimum wage still live below the poverty line.
Trump and the GOP say they hate welfare because it discourages the hard work they purport to value, but we'd say the reality is that Republicans don’t hate welfare; they just hate it for the poor. Between Trump’s budget and the dead-for-now GOP health plans, conservatives’ policies are nothing but shameless attempts to strip resources from average Americans. From radical cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and food stamps (SNAP) to defunding student loans, federal worker retirement programs and disability programs, this is nothing but death by a thousand cuts.
While making the welfare system that serves the poor as punitive as possible, conservative lawmakers are eager to broaden the parallel welfare state that enriches and empowers the people at the top (who, not coincidentally, fund those same lawmakers’ campaigns). We rarely think of policies like the mortgage interest deduction, preferential tax rates for the wealthy on capital gains, or the CEO pay loophole as the pillars of a welfare state for the wealthy, but that’s precisely what they amount to. Forget bootstraps; the government has given these mainly white male individuals a golden ladder to opportunity and wealth.
Moreover, conservatives’ peddling of racial resentment to garner support for economic programs that enrich the rich while further impoverishing the poor is nothing new. Remember Reagan’s welfare-queen trope, which painted a caricature of people on public assistance as an undeserving black women who exploited the system to avoid working? Trump and his team have breathed new life into that destructive narrative. When questioned about the GOP’s proposal to kick millions of low-income Americans off Medicaid, Kellyanne Conway suggested those folks could simply go find a job that offered them health insurance. “If they are able-bodied and they want to work, then they’ll have employer-sponsored benefits like you and I do.”
Though the bootstraps myth disproportionately harms people of color and immigrants—and particularly women who occupy the intersection of those identities—the real kicker is that it also hurts the white Americans who voted Trump into office, whom Trump had promised to help. Let’s not forget that lower-income white Americans are more likely to be on food stamps than their black neighbors.
Conservatives will continue to use the bootstraps ideology to justify and advance their harmful policy agenda. It’s time to call this rhetoric what it is: a myth that obscures the welfare state that benefits the 1 percent while pulling the rug out from everyone else. These policies—not a lack of work ethic, not immigrants, and not people of color—are the real source of pain for so many Americans. To “make America great” for average Americans, we need to stop coddling the rich and instead rewrite the rules of our economy so that it works for all of us.
Related: Donald Trump's Budget Would Negatively Impact Young People
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