The Courage to Make American Mythology True

American mythology begins with a promise.

It says that a person can be born anywhere, arrive from anywhere, begin with almost nothing and, through work and perseverance, change the circumstances of their life.

I grew up believing that promise. I saw it in the house next door. I watched people build lives that bore little resemblance to the conditions into which they were born. Their beginnings did not determine their endings.

That belief is more than an economic proposition. It is the spiritual foundation of America.

It is also increasingly difficult to defend.

The advantage of a transparent society is that corruption can be exposed. The disadvantage is that once it has been exposed, we must decide whether we have the courage to confront it.

The American economy has separated into three layers.

The first is a small group of controlling oligarchs. Roughly fourteen people now possess about one percent of the country’s wealth. They control more money than millions of Americans combined, pay lower effective tax rates than working people and use campaign finance to shape the government responsible for regulating them.

The second layer is the governing elite: the politicians, appointees, lobbyists and intermediaries who translate concentrated wealth into public policy and are now openly and brazenly corrupt.

The third layer is everyone else. It includes successful business owners, doctors, lawyers, teachers, firefighters, students, service workers, minimum-wage workers and the unemployed. Their circumstances may be different, but they are all expected to follow the same rules.

They are told that the people above them are simply more successful players in the same game.

They are not playing the same game.

In 2011, while hosting The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC, I said that the United States had a bought Congress. The statement traveled because people already understood the mechanism. Nearly 300,000 Americans joined the effort we created afterward to get money out of politics.

I believed that if we exposed the mechanism clearly enough, the country would act.

Instead, the mechanism became stronger.

Campaigns became more expensive. Donors became more powerful. Regulators moved between government and the industries they were supposed to police. Access to public officials became a private commodity.

We now watch allegations of money being solicited in exchange for access, insider trading investigations being halted as markets move billions of dollars, government contracts flowing toward politically connected businesses and officials influencing policies capable of enriching their own families.

Each allegation deserves an independent investigation and due process. Together, they reveal a system in which public power is increasingly converted into private advantage.

That is the real American reality check.

The mythology says that talent and effort determine the outcome. The reality is that access, ownership and political influence increasingly determine who is permitted to succeed.

Recognizing this is not an act of cynicism. It is an act of patriotism.

A mythology is not necessarily a lie because a country has failed to live up to it. It can also be a promise—a description of what a nation believes it should become.

The question is whether we have the courage to make that promise true.

In 1892, in the middle of America’s first industrial revolution, the People’s Party described a nation brought to the verge of “moral, political, and material ruin.” It condemned corruption in the ballot box, the legislatures, Congress and the courts. It warned that the labor of millions was being used to build colossal fortunes for a few.

The language sounds contemporary because America has been here before.

The country eventually responded. Monopolies were broken apart. Labor organized. Democratic institutions became stronger. Concentrated economic power was subjected to public accountability.

Those reforms did not happen because the people benefiting from the system surrendered their power. They happened because Americans demanded that the country honor its own promise.

We are now at the beginning of another industrial revolution. Artificial intelligence, monopoly power and political corruption are reorganizing American life faster than our democratic institutions are responding.

The answer is not to abandon capitalism or America. The answer is to recover both.

We must break up the monopolies that have captured markets and government. We must enact comprehensive campaign-finance reform so that public office can no longer be purchased through private money. We must identify and prosecute bribery wherever public power is exchanged for private advantage. We must make government radically transparent, subjecting public contracts, expenditures and decisions to continuous independent audit so that we can reduce unnecessary spending, eliminate fraud and waste, and allow every citizen to see where the money goes and who benefits from it.

Courage does not mean defending America from criticism. It means looking directly at what America has become without surrendering what America could still be.

The mythology is not dead.

It is waiting for us to make it true.