When Did America Turn from a Melting Pot to a Pressure Cooker?
The division, anger, and desperation in Land of the Free aren’t random occurrences
This article by Mitchell Peterson, was posted to Medium.com on December 27, 2022.
America, you beautiful mess. My political essays are usually full of choice words for my home country, so many might be surprised to know I have genuine affection for the land of Yosemite, bourbon, the Super Bowl, Seinfeld, jazz, and Pumpkin Spice.
There are many many things I love about the US.
And while the ‘melting pot’ framing has always been more sloganeering than practice, as the latest group of immigrants is inevitably demonized and the only original Indigenous Americans, who survived genocide, are still somehow marginalized in the national mythos, the US is a unique cultural force.
It is a place where new arrivals or second-generation individuals can rock their passports and American identity in a way that doesn’t quite happen in many other nations.
And like the common question posed to Donald Trump, “for whom and when was this mythic and great America you’d like to resurrect?” There’s always been a Grand Canyon-sized gap between the rhetoric and reality of all men are created equal, democratic values, rule of law, and the rest of the ideals that the nation pretends to uphold and exemplify.
But the ideas seem worth pursuing.
These days, however, America is a nation on two completely detached planets of information. It is a place where wearing a mask during a pandemic somehow reveals one’s politics, where the media is programming citizens to believe the greatest threat is their neighbor who votes differently, and a place that can’t hold a school board meeting without fights breaking out, let alone a national freaking election.
I’ve written before that, barring some miracle, the 2024 cycle will probably be the most hotly-contested, highly charged, and chaotic election yet.
Americans are desperate for change but have no idea where it’ll come from because most have no idea how we got here.
They’re rightfully angry at the declining quality of life and corporate-purchased government that has kept wages flat for fifty years while GDP and productivity soared, failed for nearly a century to implement a functioning health system, and spends half of its discretionary funds dropping bombs on poor nations in the name of defense.
It has gotten so bad that life expectancy is declining. America has been purposefully degraded to the point where citizens are more stressed, chronically ill, and dying earlier than in the last twenty-five years.
I was discussing all of the horrific current trends with some friends in the pub a few weeks ago, talking about how Americans are under ever more financial strain, which led my good buddy Vašek to pose this legendary titular question: when did America turn from a melting pot to a pressure cooker?
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” — William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)
The role propaganda, disinformation, and false history have played cannot be overstated. Like many empires, the things we learn about the national origin story are flat-out false or half-truths at best.
How do white Europeans ‘discover’ a land with tens of millions of inhabitants and then not correct the language in their history books five hundred years later? The proper terms are ‘invasion, genocide, and theft’ not ‘discover’ and ‘expand Westward.’
Why can’t the history be correctly taught? And why are the millennia of indigenous tradition still purposefully left out of the story of the continent?
Beyond that, there’s no historical understanding of colonialism or even slavery, and because of this historical ignorance, Americans have a completely distorted self-perception and almost no knowledge of how the world came to be the way it is — most Europeans are the same, but that’s a separate piece.
The myths and outright lies surrounding free market capitalism also run very deep in the American psyche, playing a pernicious role in perpetuating systemic inequality and modern imperialism.
We’re taught to worship at the feet of the Rockefeller-JP Morgan extraordinary-man mold, which leads us not even to bat an eye as Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than his secretary or whose rail company, which makes billions in profits , recently used the government to suppress a worker strike after they had the audacity to ask for a few sick days.
We put these figures on the cover of our magazines and ask them about their mindset or morning routine and never press them on their treatment of workers who die from exhaustion on the job, have little to no benefits, and have their wages stolen by the very billionaire we’re taught to exalt.
…because of this historical ignorance, Americans have a completely distorted self-perception and almost no knowledge of how the world came to be the way it is…
Language is important and there’s a reason ‘oligarch’ only appears when referencing the rich in geopolitical enemy states. We somehow only have wealthy and politically powerful ‘entrepreneurs.’
But a lot of policy decisions both foreign and domestic get very interesting when analyzed through the lens of wealthy paranoia about workers questioning capitalism, let alone reading a bit and pondering the evil word ‘socialism.’
So Americans are led to believe that making money means bringing value, that wealth is bestowed by God, and that the mega-mansions and candy-painted jet skis are signs of intellectual and moral superiority.
We’re taught that these uber-rich must be bringing something to society to be getting all of that money. But as the saying goes, behind every great fortune is a great crime.
So, in the pursuit of shareholder value maximization, corporate financial raiders purchased well-functioning American companies, laid off the employees, sent the jobs overseas, and left the factories and small towns to rot.
A select few made billions, shareholders were rewarded, GDP went up, and many cheered on this ‘innovation’ as America’s industrial hub became the Rust Belt.
The global economy became a race to the bottom as firms found the lowest-wage hungry children to employ abroad and nations dropped tax rates to nothing, allowing multinationals to incorporate at a foreign PO box and suck trillions out of domestic revenues.
None of it was inevitable; it was greed.
So, in the pursuit of shareholder value maximization, corporate financial raiders purchased well-functioning American companies, laid off the employees, sent the jobs overseas, and left the factories and small towns to rot.
Itis all a case study of how private equity firms, hedge funds, and financial institutions making money doesn’t mean they’re bringing value. More often than not, they are doing the opposite and extracting rents from the real productive economy.
Rather than raise wages to lift up the purchasing power of the peasants, debt is issued which traps them under a mountain of obligations gaining interest that keeps them obedient. And now, the uber-rich are buying the land and housing right out from under American workers.
It isn’t overly complicated, and the history and proper analysis could be taught. But an educated proletariat is something the ruling class knows to explicitly avoid.
So we’re bombarded with daily propaganda from corporate-backed media and think tanks while the wealthy sponsor ‘intellectuals’ to parade around and parrot the same bland ‘West is Best’ tropes.
Don’t worry, peasants.
Don’t demand any dignity.
‘Innovation’ will save us.
Tax breaks for billionaires and corporate deregulation inevitably get framed as ‘freedom’ and promoting growth while wage increases and maternity leave receive five-alarm-fire fear-mongering.
Because Americans don’t know history or how things work in other nations, a functioning healthcare system can easily be scapegoated as ‘communism’ while the insatiably greedy are seeking to undermine even the basic and widely popular Medicare and Social Security.
Student loan forgiveness is beyond the pale, but blank bailout checks are handed out to corporations every few years and PPP loans to businesses were wiped clean without a whisper about ‘fairness’ from the concern-trolling media.
Citizens in the United States of Amnesia eat a lot of these narratives up but can feel the ground sliding out from under them, and they’re not sure why it is happening.
Tax breaks for billionaires and corporate deregulation inevitably get framed as ‘freedom’ and promoting growth while wage increases and maternity leave receive five-alarm-fire fear-mongering.
That anger is utilized and harnessed by political forces and pointed in whatever self-serving direction they please. Depending on their socioeconomic upbringing and political views, Americans are usually led into one of a few echo chambers. Fox News changed the game, making tons of money by catering to an audience, and every other mainstream outlet has followed suit.
Big Tech giants utilize algorithms and personal data to feed consumers a steady diet of personally curated fear or anger-inducing stories in order to increase time-on-site and ad revenues, again, a great example of making money doing the opposite of bringing value to society.
It’s all a soulless distraction.
It’s buy, buy, buy. Worship the 22-year-old YouTuber who flashes a two-million-dollar watch collection and fleet of cars. That’s what we’re taught to strive for.
Don’t engage in the community or try to understand the politics of power.
Democracy, we’re told, is a largely passive activity, and our role is to simply cast a vote once every two or four years.
The talking heads break down the ‘news’ and stir anger. In a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. The voters on ‘the other side’ are the cause of all our problems.
Get out and vote harder for Team Blue or Team Red, and they’ll ‘fix’ it.
Americans can’t see the corporate chain around our necks.
In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the rich have purchased the government, rendered it useless, and then use that ineffectiveness as a reason to further their power outside of democracy.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: government itself isn’t the problem. Corporate-owned government is the problem.
The profit motive being the only national priority and infiltrating our prisons, schools, and hospitals is the problem.
Constant war being good business is the problem.
The commodification of everything from our data, attention, insecurities, high blood pressure, and children’s fears is the problem.
Being blinded by the magic Big Business revenue numbers going up every quarter like it means something for everyday people is the problem.
Americans not knowing how we got here is the problem. And until we can see that corporate domination is the defining issue of our time, the quality of life will further degrade.
A wealthy class that is completely disconnected from reality and whose insatiable greed knows no limits has turned a nation of many single-income middle-class families going to decent schools in productive communities across the nation into a hellscape of anger, housing encampments, violence, and the working poor.
The neoliberal era has turned America from a melting pot into a pressure cooker.
