RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/15/the-elites-are-hoarding-the-american-dream/

Whatever happened to the American Dream? Only a generation ago, millions of Americans still held to this vision of meritocracy. The US prided itself on being the land of opportunity, where the rigid class system of the old world could be overcome. But as Batya Ungar-Sargon lays out in her new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, the dream has collided with a new reality. An oligarchy has emerged, propping itself up by keeping the working classes down. The laptop class thrives, while hardworking Americans are increasingly struggling to get by.

Batya discussed all these issues and more on the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What has happened to meritocracy in America?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: What’s happened in the US is tragic. Americans still like to see ourselves as a classless society. We want to believe that we’re a nation that has abandoned the burdens of aristocracy. Part of how we left those burdens behind was by believing that the US should adopt a meritocratic drive. We pushed the idea that a person’s talents should raise them up as high as possible. But this drive for meritocracy has effectively calcified into an oligarchy of credentialism.

What I mean by this is that certain kinds of talents, such as being able to sit and study for a very long time, can pretty much guarantee you a successful life in America. But the talents that we need much more, like being able to drive a truck for 12 hours straight or care for the elderly, are treated as though they are worthless. The people who do these tasks – the working classes – are treated like they’re nothing.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-bad-therapy-why-the-kids-arent-growing-up

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier (Sentinel, 320 pp., $30)

Abigail Shrier’s first book, 2020’s Irreversible Damage, launched the mother of all cancel campaigns. Because the book attributed the sudden and inexplicable rise in juvenile gender anxiety to social contagion rather than the activist-approved explanation of social progress, Shrier, an occasional contributor to City Journal, was branded a “transphobe.” Amazon employees demanded the company remove the book from its virtual shelves. Unlike the suits at Target, who briefly did exactly that, Amazon stopped short of cancelling the book and settled for banning any paid advertising. Despite growing questions about juvenile transgender treatment, including among practitioners, many libraries continue to treat Irreversible Damage as radioactive. Only last month, a Japanese publisher reneged on plans to publish the book, proving that, whether or not transgenderism is contagious, the urge to cancel those out of line with approved ideas unquestionably is.  

Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy, an astute and impassioned analysis of the mental-health crisis now afflicting adolescents, may cause a similar emotional meltdown in some corners of American culture. Shrier’s target is more expansive than it was in Irreversible Damage; she aims her fire at the therapeutic mindset that pervades not just the offices of psychologists and counsellors, but elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, best-seller lists, middle-class homes, and government agencies. It’s a pernicious development because a therapeutic mindset easily paralyzes kids’ natural defenses and resilience, hence the crisis we confront today. Assuming a Bad Therapy backlash comes, it is unlikely to be as heated as it was in the case of Irreversible Damage—therapists, who have the most to lose if Shrier’s analysis were to win out, are a more sedate crowd than trans activists—but one hopes that for the sake of the rising generation, any pushback won’t prevent people from heeding the warnings of this important book.