American Idiot

Let us, with a shred of skepticism and a sliver of reason, examine the absolutely bizarre American working class’s allegiance to its own gravediggers. If the American empire is someday found in the dumpster of history, it will not be the extreme greed of its plutocrats that leaves future chroniclers with their chins to the floor. Greed, after all, is as old as ambition. What will provoke genuine befuddlement is the performance of the dispossessed, the downtrodden, the very people whose pockets were being picked, raising their banners in adulation of their pickpockets. Even purchasing their merch.

In a country where the working class once built unions and demanded bread, we now see a mass genuflection to the altar of the billionaire. The very architects of inequality are not only tolerated; they are lionized. Their names become brands, their fortunes a kind of secular gospel. The working class, far from storming the castle, lines up to buy the T-shirts.

It is not enough to say that millions voted against their own interests. That would be a mere lapse in judgment, a forgivable error in a fog of propaganda. No, the tragedy is deeper: they have become apostles of their own undoing. They have slashed their own benefits, gutted their own healthcare, and cheered as the rich wrote off their private jets. An act of hari kari performed with a smile.

And why? Not because any of this generosity trickled down to them. Not because the policies of plutocracy ever filled the pantry or paid the hospital bill. But because they were told, with a wink and a dog whistle, that someone else, some “other” would suffer more. The politics of resentment, that most American of bourbons, was distilled and served neat.

Here is the true genius of the con: not a single law need be broken. (although many have been) The concept of democracy is not smashed but subverted, its ideals transformed by envy and misdirection. The poor are not merely complicit; they are enthusiastic participants in the rigging of their own fate. They have been convinced that the suffering of others is a victory for themselves, even as their own pots grow to a boil.

To paraphrase Orwell, it is not merely that the proles do not rebel; it is that they have been taught to love their chains. The American experiment, if it ends in farce, will do so not because the rich were greedy, but because the poor were loyal, loyal to a fantasy, loyal to a lie, loyal to the very system that ensured their subjugation. That, in the end, is the most breathtaking scheme of all.