If you’ve been involved in political snark over the past decade, you’ve surely heard something about bootstraps. It’s a common talking point – part of Republican messaging is that poor people should just work harder and “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
A quick Google-search of “GOP + ‘bootstraps'” gives a heck of a lot of results, including but not limited to:
- A Kentucky politician labeling himself as “bootstraps working class Walmart guy” who happened to also be valedictorian, class president, a triple-major, and holder of two master’s degrees, much like everyone else in Kentucky.
- A WaPo article that simply points out a culture of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps rather than relying on government handouts” would reject the overall demeanor of the recent Republican party.
- Of course we also find a reference to how Hitler did this and poor people should look to him for inspiration.
- And a Guardian article (which will absolutely steal the thunder of the one you’re reading right now), noting how the phrase has “become a key component of the Republican ideology, especially as it relates to racial inequality.”
So it’s not just something that lives in the imagination of liberals who like to point out that Republican policy holds people down from doing the very thing that they’re preaching. Though to be clear, the phrase 100% flies in the face of typical Republican policy.
BUT WAIT!
What in the world does it even mean to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps?”
This writer never thought much about it, thinking that it was a way of saying “you gotta start at the bottom – your feet – and pull yourself up from there” or some metaphor like that. It seemed innocuous enough, and relatively understandable to boot (sorry). Messaging is important for political parties, so why not accept this at face value?
Because that is quite literally the opposite of what this phrase is meant to convey. The original phrase, by all accounts, is based on the expression, “If you want to lift yourself up, simply pull yourself up by the bootstraps.”
Alternatively, it was something like, “In order to get over a fence, just lift yourself up by your bootstraps and carry yourself over.” Take a moment and think about how insane that is. That’s like saying, “I’m going to lock my kid in the basement to teach them what it’s like to have a parent who locks them in the basement, so they can appreciate me for not being the kind of parent who locks my kid in the basement.”
Furthermore, as the Useless Etymology link above mentions, the original usage within the socioeconomic world was meant to convey that it was impossible to actually move up – this was/is a sarcastic phrase about how static the classes really are.
To clarify: the entire narrative of bootstraps as a GOP talking point – which Democrats like to point out is stupid and impossible and disingenuous at best – started as a talking point about doing something stupid and impossible, but got talked about so much that it just became part of their lore and is treated, more or less, as a key tenet of the party’s messaging.
America is weird.