When You Have No Boots to Strap

By DON ROLLLINS

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” - [sic] M.L. King, Jr.

The lived experience of poverty is not the monolithic blight on society often portrayed by free-market zealots here and elsewhere. Rather poverty — however dire or for how long — is life spent in a state of constant insecurity, be it economic, physical, political or emotional in nature. Its complications upon complications..

Given the complexities and nuances of being without ample resources, it follows that those who find their way out of poverty have different stories to tell, and different ideas about how others might do the same. Two primary “camps” have emerged around those differences.

The infamous first is borrowed from a late 1800s German physics manual: The poor need only pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Here the sole burden for one’s insecurity lies entirely with the self. Get a job. Or two. Save that money. Accept no charity. Be your own [man].

The second narrative cuts through the gross ignorance (and callousness) of the boot-strap crowd with a searing if familiar response: How do I pull myself up with my bootstraps when I have no boots? This take on why there are haves and have nots goes to the systems — historic and contemporary, overt and covert - that guarantee such deep inequalities. Here self responsibility is necessary but nowhere near sufficient when the deck is stacked by those who hold all the best cards.

These two paradigms are always in play, even in literature.

If there’s a poster child for bootstrap economics in America it must be J.D. Vance, author and now Republican senator representing Ohio. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” was a 2016 New York Times bestseller.

Vance takes his readers through his family’s hardscrapple journey through White Appalachian poverty, then concludes that a breakdown of values not systems is to blame. Those around him stuck in generational cycles of impoverishment are lazy, without strong work ethics and enough focus to create a better future. Race is just an excuse, not a causal agent. Gender and sexual identities are excuses, not causal agents. Simply find your bootstraps and start lifting.

“Hillbilly Elegy” was initially embraced by the liberal many outside Appalachia, but enthusiasm cooled as progressive readers took a second look at what historian Bob Hutton called “primarily a work of self-congratulation.” Vance had taken more than a few liberties. But in the end, sham or not, he parlayed the book’s popularity into a successful first political campaign.

Much less known in the American mainstream is author Matthew Desmond, whom the progressive magazine Christian Century described as writing “… from the rare perspective of an academic who experienced poverty and is still intimately close to those who are poor.”

Desmond’s most recent work, “Poverty, by America,” is not a memoir per Vance’s book, but an unflinching use of facts and direct anecdotes to point the discussion in the right direction: toward the powerful.

Desmond undergirds that claim with a series of researched realities: Polls indicate the highest support for labor unions since 1965, yet their popularity is being submarined by red-state legislators beholden to corporate donors; Nearly $1.2 billion per year is earmarked for aid to Americans living in deep poverty, yet 88 cents on the dollar are siphoned off by lawyers hired to help eligible persons through the maze of red tape, and; The IRS estimates corporate tax cheaters take the public for $1 trillion annually; meanwhile congressional Republicans are cutting agency funding at every opportunity.

Unlike Vance, Desmond doesn’t appeal to a squishy set of partyline values for interrupting what he calls “… material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on …” Instead, his prescription for ending poverty is to adopt an abolitionist approach. Engage progressive elites in funding antipoverty candidates and causes. Use that money to work the same political levers as the other side. Build state coalitions modeled on the Poor People’s Campaign and other effective entities. Organize or join with existing local, direct services guided by those with the lived experience of poverty in America. Get out of your comfort zone.

This gulf between Vance’s and Desmond’s poverty narratives shows no sign of narrowing, quite the opposite as wealth continues to be channeled to the already wealthy. All the more reason for progressives to be disturbed to the point of action. To counter with more than words the notion of a better life with a simple tug of the bootstrap.

Don Rollins is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2023

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