There’s little charm in the current US administration’s version of the American Dream. Look at the original model. Not even its populariser, the financier-cum-historian James Truslow Adams, tied it exclusively to wealth-creation and the accumulation of power. In his version, while the Dream included the promise of cars and high wages, it was underpinned by a Protestant ethic of hard work and a notion of individual flourishing. Adams pictured a people unrestrained by the old world’s fusty ways and class biases, pursuing their happiness by the exploitation of the country’s seemingly inexhaustible natural resources. Enrichment, born of industrialisation, was the Dream’s driver. Liberty and equality were its end.

In the new Vice-President’s imagining, the Dream is linked to a philosophy of self-help. J.D. Vance’s rags-to-riches story, Hillbilly Elegy, takes a swipe at a host of political, corporate and cocktail party elites to proudly defend working-class common sense and know-how. The only way to create space for the J.D.s of the world, he asserts, is for the J.D.s to stop blaming Obama, Bush or anyone else for their woes and make their own destiny. Rise up! Fight back! His Dream, or fantasy, is to release the poorest from the fetters of a welfare system that seemingly reduces them to the status of a permanent underclass. Slashing state spending then becomes the key to self-respect and universal social mobility.

The hard edge of Vance’s Dream looks like a reworking of the coping strategy that the sociologist Robert Merton, a near-contemporary of Adams, called the ‘illegitimacy adjustment’. Observing the disconnect between the aspiration for success and effective opportunities to realise it, he thought that the Dream bred ‘exaggerated anxieties, hostilities, neuroses and antisocial behaviour’. The inherent contradiction was that, out of the vast majority who embraced its cultural values, only a handful were able to live it. Everyone knew that the opportunities for success were unevenly distributed. So, confronting failure as believers, they either accepted that the Dream was unattainable or, like Al Capone, beat their own path to success.

Vance’s aggressive slant disrupts the easy rhythms of the original vision. Adams’s confidence in the American Dream was rooted in his faith that good sense and pragmatism would always prevail at home and that, in time, America would cast its improving shadow across the world. ‘Americanisation’, he argued, would cease to be a synonym for the ‘debasement and vulgarisation’ of old values, and would come to be associated with the march of democracy and the protection of liberal rights – freedoms of speech, thought, action, press and religion. Writing in 1933, only days before Hitler’s Enabling Act dismantled Weimar democracy, he imagined America spearheading the creation of the new international order. Isolation, he blithely asserted, was now as impossible for America as it was for China or Japan.

Unlike Vance, Adams was far less amenable to constitutional innovation. In 1937, when President Roosevelt, then at the start of his second term, threatened to load the Supreme Court with judges well-disposed to his New Deal policies, Adams worried that the pressure on government to alleviate the worst effects of the economic downturn would likely hasten a slide from constitutionalism to dictatorship. It was as if the effort to maintain the illusion of happiness demanded the relaxation of constitutional checks on presidential power, just as the drive for wealth incentivised gangsterism.

Vance’s anti-welfarism is a reversal of everything the New Deal stands for, but similarly points towards the abandonment of constitutionalism. In this new dreamworld, greatness is virtue and recovery means rolling back time, and the state with it.

Can anything be salvaged from the wreckage of Adams’ vision? Maybe. In the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher appropriated ‘self-help’ as a mantra for state retrenchment, Colin Ward rejected state welfarism as the antidote, arguing that her ‘devil-take-the-hindmost individualism’ distorted Samuel Smiles’ original mid-Victorian idea. Recouping self-help as a form of DIY, he recommended it as a foundation for social policy.

Malcolm X set out a related defence of self-help in his 1964 address ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’. He focused on the disjuncture between American ideals and realities. The same year that Martin Luther King Jr. described the American Dream as ‘yet unfulfilled’, he talked about the American nightmare. Looking at America through the eyes ‘of someone who has been the victim of Americanism’, he saw only hypocrisy: White America liked to tell itself that it had created the world anew, but old-world prejudice was still alive and kicking. For all the talk of freedom, the Dream had given rise to a wave of colonialism as brutal as anything the French and English had perpetrated. He called it twentieth-century slavery. Malcolm X, like King, held fast to dreaming. But he argued that it was foolish to think that American institutions offered a route to liberation or that anyone in charge could grant freedom. Speaking as a Black nationalist, he advocated ‘a self-help program, a do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, an it's-already-too-late philosophy’.

Neither view bears any relation to Vance’s take on self-help. In different ways, both urge a constitutional reset.

In the 1930s, when Adams was conjuring the Dream, Rudolf Rocker, the anarchist beloved by Noam Chomsky, set out his proposal. In Pioneers of American Freedom, an intellectual history of liberalism and radicalism, he tied self-help to self-government.

Like Adams, Rocker admired Jefferson (even though he was a slave owner). But unlike Adams, he liked Jefferson’s scepticism more than his defence of liberal rights.

Predictably, he endorsed Jefferson’s famous statement: ‘That government is best which governs the least’. But he coupled it with a less well-known phrase: ‘An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens’. Jefferson, Rocker argued, rejected the ‘will to power’ - Rocker’s term for the inclination shared by all politicians (including advocates of the minimal state) to lord it over others. He then considered a third statement: the ‘time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rules are honest, and ourselves united’.

Nice sentiment. But no such time existed. The attempt to foster self-help on the back of a Dream created by dishonest rules and the delusion of the nation-as-one normalised the abuse of power. The nightmare would never end until the governed let go of the Dream and formulated new rules of association.

Ruth Kinna is a professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University. She is the author of The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism and Great Anarchists.

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