Some of us have begun to wake from the fabled land of the United States, the country as it exists in mythology, and the real United States, the present corrupt and unlivable place where we weep away our days. It can be painful to strip away the fables and look upon the reality. We have to strip away what Giroux calls the “violence of organized forgetting,” to awake from the dream world that would cause us to look away from the real suffering we see every day. Those illusions kept us sane, as we believed that there was something better on the other side of the decades of toil and exploitation. Well yes, we told ourselves, things may be bad now, but one day I’ll be able to retire. One day I’ll be able to buy groceries without having to check my bank balance. One day I’ll get out of debt. For the vast majority, one day never comes.

The American dream, really a form of make-believe, has told us that if we keep our heads down and work hard, we will be successful. This lie that we keep repeating says that if we do not make too many waves, if we work within the system, things will be better for everyone. Yes, there may be certain imperfections, but the country corrects itself in the long run. So we give things another year, and then another decade, and so on, until we find ourselves staring down death with not a dime to our names, having spent our days in mere survival, that is, for those who make it out alive. Many thousands die of despair at a young age, never having tasted the good life that we see in the advertisements of the dream makers.

Capitalism in the United States fails to deliver on the promises of freedom and plenty that it continues to make. Millions must decide between getting a prescription filled and putting gas in the car. Millions put groceries on a credit card or simply go without. The daily round of most workers is filled not with thoughts of an upcoming vacation but with the dream of being able to one day quit their second or third job — if they have a job at all. In a society that judges worth by money and consumption, there is an additional factor of shame associated with excessive debt, the plague that is crippling generations.

Home ownership is no longer within reach for many millennials, who live in overinflated real estate markets and lack the capital for a downpayment. The transaction normally called “purchasing” a home really amounts to a form of debt servitude, as the bank really owns the title to the house and land. The “homeowner” (serf) takes care of repairs and mows the lawn, while the banks collect their rents in the form of mortgage interest. Most mortgages will never be repaid in full, and yet we continue to refer to the largely fictional narrative of owning a home as the pathway to membership in the middle class.

This fictional middle class, propped up by staggering amounts of debt — credit cards, mortgages, student loans, and personal loans — would not exist without extortionary lending. With each passing year, debt continues to grow while being backed by nothing more than the vague notion that people can “afford” to assume more and more of a burden. This debt is like a game of musical chairs, with the music stopping at each recession. Only instead of a prize awarded to the winners, the game continues with the issuance of ever more false value. Those who lose the game are ejected from the system (and into prison or onto the streets), with nothing to show for it. Any working family in America is just one emergency away from this fate.

The Federal Reserve found, in 2019 (reporting on 2018 data), that 39% of Americans would not be able to cover a $400 expense using cash and would have to borrow money from family and friends, sell something, or charge the expense on a credit card. Twelve percent would not be able to cover the unexpected expense by any means. The numbers have been hovering around this range for several years now. A response to the statistics, by Winship at the Review, is telling: “Some — especially higher up the income ladder — have retirement or educational savings accounts they can tap. Some have home equity.” In other words, things are not so bad because some of the people surveyed have non-cash assets that they can tap. Winship misses the point that people actually need their savings for, well, education and retirement. As for home equity, Winship seems to be encouraging the sort of borrowing that led to the 2008 financial crisis, vehicles like reverse mortgages and home equity lines of credit. Tapping into investments to pay current expenses only makes households more vulnerable over the long haul, and many families, of course, do not have home equity or any meaningful savings.

The home ownership rate as of the third quarter of 2019 was 64.8%, with over a third renting their homes, accruing no equity. Of the 64.8%, some of those homes are still “underwater,” meaning that the homeowner owes more on the home than the market value. Getting a home equity line of credit also depends on having a good credit score, which depends on variables like income and credit history. It is not reasonable to expect home equity to be a source of emergency funds for troubled households. Nor can we count on households having retirement or educational savings. The Wall Street Journal reports that one quarter of American adults have no retirement savings, while another 44% worry that their retirement savings are not sufficient. When it comes to educational savings, only 56% of American parents have educational savings for their children, in a time when educational costs have far outpaced earnings. Only a perverse society would ask people to choose between putting new brakes on their car or having retirement savings or ask them to loot their educational savings to pay for a trip to the doctor.

The importance of propaganda to the continued functioning of this system cannot be overstated. Propaganda comes in the form of advertising, which encourages the spend-and-debt cycle. It comes in the form of entertainment, which numbs the pain of the daily grind. It comes in the form of the news media, which lend an air of legitimacy to crumbling and corrupt institutions. Thanks to “smart” devices and social media, the stream of propaganda continues twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of location or circumstance. Due to computer algorithms, this propaganda is also tailored to our individual habits and preferences, so that it becomes as persuasive as it is ubiquitous. Pervasive propaganda makes us think it is normal to have a paycheck that does not last through the whole pay period or to have to rotate bills each month. It is all too easy to forget debilitating debt and concentrate on the fantasies served up by the entertainment industry.

The phrase “entertainment industry” does not hope to capture what Debord has called “the society of the spectacle,” in which fictive scenarios replace any sort of accountability or democracy. The democracies of the west need not actually deliver any power to the people, as long as the appearance of meaningful critique remains intact. Through the talking heads of the news media, the staged and scripted mass “protests,” the internet chatter and hot takes, the passive consumer comes to feel — even to believe deeply — that he or she lives in a society that tolerates dissent. All the while, the donor class determines the boundaries of acceptable debate and frames all conversation in terms amenable to the neoliberal status quo.

In the society of the spectacle, fictional narratives determine what can be thought as well as the general outlines of the conceptual apparatus. The shibboleths of the West include the idea that democracy promotes free and open society, that consumer choice is the best way to determine the common good, that free markets work for the good of all, and so forth. These assumptions are not ordinarily even noticed, so much do they pervade the public discourse, if such a discourse can even be labeled as “public.” The line between information and propaganda has been blurred to the point of meaninglessness. The term, “propaganda” applies only to so-called dictatorships, while the corrupting influence of paid speech — on cable news networks, talk radio, and government sponsored media — never gets effectively countered.

Corporate-state propaganda cannot be limited to advertising alone, as the oligarchic point of view determines the bounds of what can be said and thought. The news itself expresses a point of view, and not merely in the Fox News universe. Sponsored elites, in publishing houses, news networks, and academic departments, act as gatekeepers to filter information away from anything deemed radical or subversive. The “marketplace of ideas,” in which differing perspectives compete for supremacy, has, in reality, already been fixed, so that neoliberal ideology remains always front and center. The advantageous thing, from an elite perspective, is to create the illusion of meaningful dissent while making sure, all the while, that dissent never becomes more than blowing off steam. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” goes the old cliche, but most of the pens and swords have already been sold to the highest bidders, those who already have the most money. Speech can be monopolized just like ordinary commodities.

Speech can also be made into a spectacle (in Debord’s sense), as information becomes infotainment, and the protest becomes a made-for-TV moment. Dr. King and Malcolm X were not as far apart, politically, as contemporary liberals would like to believe, but Malcolm’s critique of the March on Washington remains instructive:

Not long ago, the black man in America was fed another dose of the weakening, lulling and deluding effects of so-called ‘integration.’ It was the ‘Farce on Washington,’ I call it.

The idea of a mass of blacks marching on Washington was originally the brainchild of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ A. Philip Randolph. For twenty or more years, the March on Washington idea had floated around among Negroes. And, spontaneously, suddenly now, that idea caught on. …

This was a national bitterness; militant, unorganized, and leaderless. Predominantly, it was young Negroes, defiant of whatever might be the consequences, sick and tired of the black man’s neck under the white man’s heel.

The white man had plenty of good reasons for nervous worry. The right spark — some unpredictable emotional chemistry — could set off a black uprising. The government knew that thousands of milling, angry blacks not only could completely disrupt Washington — but they could erupt in Washington.

Malcolm X relates how the White House got in touch with the major civil rights organizations, the NAACP and the rest of the “Big Six,” trying to get them to stop the march. When it became clear that these non-profits had no control over the march, the plan switched to stagecrafting it. Malcolm X laments, “the original ‘angry’ March on Washington was about to be entirely changed…. For the status-seeker, it was a status symbol. ‘Were you there?’ You can hear that right today. … there wasn’t a single logistics aspect uncontrolled.” The United States has developed the ability to co-opt and contain protest movements, so that they become part of the mythos of the nation. In this way, radicals become their opposites — symbols of the status quo.

I went with some friends of mine to the February 15, 2003, protest against the invasion of Iraq. That situation felt somewhat volatile. Although the hundreds of thousands of people were contained within pens, the crowd broke through to another avenue not along the planned route. Mounted police on horseback held the crowds back, and they felt the intimidation factor of the large animals with heavily armed cops. But, at the end of the day, the protest amounted to little more than an annoyance for the city. The crowds dispersed and went home. CNN played images of the demonstration, which amounted to propaganda for the United States. The message conveyed was, see how tolerant we are. We even permit protests against our foreign policy. Outside the independent media, the point of view of the protestors was rarely conveyed. The talking heads on television were almost always politicians and military people. On the rare occasions when reporters interviewed protestors, they almost always selected the most benign quotations.

I went to another protest in Washington at around the same time. I rode the train and then a chartered bus to D.C. with New Jersey Peace Action and some other groups. That protest was even more benign, and it struck me, even at the time, how choreographed the event had been. Washington, D.C. ran the protest like clockwork, with pre-planned parking, march routing, and exit. Everyone was home in time for a late dinner. The march leaders got their sound bites, the politicians could say they allowed free expression, and nothing at all changed. Protests must become not just inconvenient but intolerable for the powers that be.