Recently, presidential candidate Joe Biden employed the cliche technique of quoting the declaration of independence at a rally- or at least tried to; He struggled to remember the words.

The parallels write themselves here: politicians seeming like they just woke up from the American dream and are struggling to remember it over breakfast. It’s a tempting thought, but makes for a better couplet than it does accurate analysis. In reality, Biden patting his pockets for the words that define his country is a cough to America’s cold; the visible sign of an invisible sickness. A reminder that our core ideology isn’t in the process of being forgotten, it’s long dead. If you feel like you missed the funeral, that’s because there wasn’t one; we’re still barhopping with its corpse.

When a politician references (or attempts to remember) the rhetoric of the founding fathers, they are appealing to what’s called Classical Liberalism, the belief in rugged individualism, natural rights, and so on. Almost every patriotic buzzword connects back to that philosophy and its goal of meritocracy: regardless of circumstance, hard work is met with achievement.

Who killed it? Well, for a self-evident truth, it has a less than obvious catch: basing merit off work ethic only makes sense if effort is consistently met with proportional return; the economy must match the ideology. Onlookers realized this in the late nineteenth century when we began to apply this rugged individualism to things other than individuals. As corporations started citing liberalist thought to justify laissez-faire policy, a vocal chunk of the population began to see regulations on the economy the way we had always viewed restrictions on citizens: as tyranny. Rapid, dramatic concentration of wealth followed as class divides sharpened because, when left to its own devices, the interest of industry is not in promoting social mobility, but limiting it. In short, through applying our founding ideologies to business interests, we stripped those very same ideals from the people we gave them to in the first place. What followed was an economy at a direct contradiction to the culture which promoted it. The death of American ambition wasn’t a murder, it was a gradual assisted suicide; we payed good money to call a hit on ourselves.

After the bubbles stopped, the country found itself haunted by a specter- the specter of a battle between the stories we tell about America and America itself. And, like any war, our patriotism tends to prevent us from realizing the amount of lives we lose to the conflict. Because when we pray nightly to the idea that those who work hard succeed, we also affirm its logical counterpart: the unsuccessful just aren’t working hard enough. A 2017 study done by Saint John’s University on college students over the course of 26 years found that the friction between the West’s emphasis on individualism and the economic reality that effort is no guarantee of return can result in chronic self-loathing and a wide array of mental illnesses, including suicidal ideation. The consequence of generation after generation of Americans being told it’s up to them to be exceptional, only to find themselves living from exception to exception.

It’s not much of a leap to reason that much America’s youth aren’t actually apathetic, but instead don’t seek change because they believe what they’ve always been told: that their lives are up to them. That they can’t pay rent because they aren’t picking up enough shifts or can’t get a job because they aren’t going to enough interviews. Frustration at the systemic inequalities they experience that would fuel change is instead pointed inwards at their own worth. Policy makers likely treat the resulting mental illnesses as a welcome distraction from the truth: that meritocracy is a goal to be pursued through reform, not a truth to be observed through grit. 

This is why we keep the corpse of classical liberalism around, so we can nod to it both when asked why we keep passing anti-regulation legislation at the expense of the vast majority of citizens, and when questioned as to why that majority is so accepting of the resulting inequality. We forge its signature on an endless string of checks that promise meritocracy only to bounce a decade later. We cite it as the credible author of ideas we wrote ourselves. Until we don’t see the next generation of Americans as soon to be capitalists, but instead as soon to be capital.

Of course, a dead body never pays its tab and makes for rather poor conversation, but, in a way, that’s exactly the point.