'No outside ideology': Alissa Quart on poverty, the American dream, and stretching nonfiction's limits
The writer and Economic Hardship Reporting Project's executive director talks about her quest to make journalism less individualist, 'more choral'
In 1987, in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine, the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher criticized people for ‘casting their problems on society,’ she said. ‘And who is society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women and there are families’. Thatcher, like her US counter-part Ronald Reagan, was breaking with a cross-party consensus that had existed since 1945—that it was the duty of government to step in and aid people battered by the sharp winds of circumstance. Thatcher attacked homeless people for expecting the state to help house them. Reagan attacked people on food stamps and told tales of welfare fraud. Their message was clear: if you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you’ve failed. Not just economically, but morally. And moral failures should expect no help from society.
This view is the target of Alissa Quart’s recent book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (2023). Quart reaches back deep into American history to explore how the seemingly innocuous stories people learn as children—from Little House on the Prairie to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and more—help undergird this myth of individual responsibility. She outlines the damage this myth keeps wreaking, the shame it generates. Her goal, unashamedly, is to expose the contradictions and absurdity of this story, and displace it.
Alongside Bootstrapped, Quart has written other books including Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America (2018) and Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (2003), as well as poetry books Monetized (2015) and Thoughts and Prayers (2019). She is executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP), a nonprofit that has supported scores of independent journalists cover pressing topics and center new narratives on poverty and inequality.
To me, the EHRP has always seemed so refreshing, turning writing, which can often feel like a solitary pursuit—especially in a climate of lay-offs and newsroom closures—into a collective mission for truth and justice. Quart also writes for Columbia Journalism Review (where, full disclosure, I also write) and has explored how we can push the limits of nonfiction writing. My conversation with Quart, about her book, work with EHRP, and goals for journalism, has been edited for clarity and length.
JB: I want to start with your latest book, Bootstrapped, in which you trace the roots and impact of this American ideology of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps.’ I was struck by how you describe it as a ‘deadly nightshade’ that harms people—and gets in the way of us building a better society. Can you elaborate on that central idea and how you began to see it everywhere?
AQ: This is something I’ve seen working with writers and photographers, who experienced poverty or financial instability, and how it can be quite isolating. It’s isolating up and down the gradient. People who are middle class—or what I call the middle precariat and squeezed—can be isolated, because there’s shame and stigma about acknowledging you’ve lost your job, or you are struggling to pay your mortgage, or whatever. If you're at risk of being evicted, like some people we work with [at EHRP], that’s even more isolating. Even if you’re quite wealthy, that’s its own form of isolation, a hyper-individualism being protective of their time and space. We saw this during Covid, of people not wanting to be contaminated physically. So there’s a lot of isolation, it’s like a deadly nightshade, it’s psychologically toxic for all of us to have this level of differentiation and underlying fear of, especially in the US, no safety net.
Right. And we all know the phrase ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ but you trace it back to 1834. And it actually starts as a joke, because it’s an impossibility. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But we seem to have forgotten that, or it just breezes through our minds. What does it say that it’s become a founding myth and deeply entrenched idea in US culture?
That was one of the interesting things about looking at these terms. There’s a few of them I deconstruct in the book. Another is the Horatio Alger story, which is another American trope around success and meritocracy. When it was coined, it wasn’t a positive thing. A lot of these terms, like ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ they’re forged as jokes, they get reified, then become things people feel they have to live by. But, structurally, it’s an absurdity. The fact it was a joke that people took deadly seriously, it’s not coincidental. You cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps, literally or metaphorically.
Going back to your book Squeezed, you mentioned that people are ‘fronting’ as middle-class while standing on a pile of debt. I feel like in many ways, it’s easier never to mask class identity, as our lives are increasingly curated and lived online. What does it mean to you that the question of class has become much trickier and much less obvious to see?
Well, I wrote about this for the Globe and Mail, talking about self presentation online, about the ‘wealthie,’ instead of the selfie, where people take photos in front of beautiful buildings or lakes, often not places they own. It’s something the scholar Lev Manovich, a digital theorist, has studied. He analyzed millions of Instagram images shared and found images posted by locals were from the richest parts of their city. There’s a kind of social media inequality that starts to emerge, that it’s presentational and performative.
In the preface to your latest book, you quote the poet George Oppen:
Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous.
I know that quote means a lot to you. But it also struck me as a good metaphor for your work with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project—of trying to expand coverage of inequality, but also trying to change journalism to be more numerous, more of a collective. How do you see the EHRP’s mission?
Yeah, it’s exactly that, I’m glad you picked up on that. I was studying George Oppen when I was a kid in my twenties in graduate school. He was part of a group called the Objectivists. He was a Marxist, he was part of a school of Jewish poets in the 1930s—with William Carlos Williams—who saw language as an object. He was also a union organizer, and lived in Mexico. What it means to me is this idea of the ‘multitude,’ which comes out in his poetry. In the work of people I like, whether it’s poetry or nonfiction, is this idea that it’s choral. The structure of traditional nonfiction and fiction is hyper-individualist. It’s Bildungsroman, there’s a central character in a profile, there’s a voice-of-God narration. I guess I want to push against that and push for something choral. Either in my own writing, where I’m organizing a chorus of voices, or with EHRP, where literally every writer is part of that chorus. And it’s quite a democratic chorus. It’s not people from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. It’s very often people who have not been let into the mainstream media.
A big part of that seems to be encouraging journalists to think critically about the sources they use, and the so-called experts they interview in their work, right? I know you’ve done work trying to expand who’s considered an ‘expert,’ who writers will go to, and encouraging them to collaborate with people with first-person experience of, for instance, accessing the disability welfare system or something. Can you elaborate on the importance of expanding sourcing?
That’s our project called Working Sources. I went to Columbia J-School in the late-nineties. They had this whole thing: you get your expert quote. And how do you find them? You go and see the major organization that’s quoted by others, or do an early internet search. Even then, it dawned on me. ‘Well, we’re just going to get the experts that others have agreed on as experts.’ That leads to a kind of common wisdom. Sometimes that’s good. It can be about norms and status-bearing institutions rising up because they’re legitimate, and filled with professionals, and doing cutting-edge factual work. But sometimes it’s just because people have gone to them again and again, or they’re wealthy. We see people on the right supporting think tanks much more than people on the left. They’re creating professionalism through that professional knowledge work.
So I wanted to push on that with Working Sources. To have a database for anybody to use, that was vetted and fact-checked, that had people closer to the ground. We’re finishing the housing database now. At least half of the specialists are people who’ve experienced housing insecurity. Another feature of experts is they’re usually not a participant. They’re ‘impartial,’ they’re an expert through knowledge or credentialing, not lived experience. But I want experts to be both—and to follow the anthropological participant observer model. I followed the BBC’s 50:50 initiative, to get half its on-screen experts as women. Which is amazing. But all those experts are still codified. So it’s: how do we get experts who are maybe from a different class and background too?
That reminds me of something you said about Barbara Ehrenreich, a friend and colleague of yours who passed away in 2022. You’ve said she’s influenced your thinking on how the idea of the neutral, objective, both-sides reporter is always masking ideology in some way. Can you talk a bit more about that and Barbara’s wider influence on you?
Yeah. I think there’s no outside of ideology. That’s a commonplace of a lot of critical inquiry in the twentieth-century, right, that you can’t get outside of ideology or politics. One of the problems with the ‘neutral’ stance is that it doesn’t acknowledge that. In Barbara’s thinking, in order to be a moral or ethical person, sometimes you do have to become an advocate. That doesn’t mean you were a seething activist, although she was sometimes, but it often just meant you recognized that, like: inequality? Bad. Exclusion of the poor from control over their life? Bad. Like, we don’t need to pretend there’s two sides to that.
Yeah, definitely. And I know policy solutions—discussing alternative ways we might build society—have always been a core part of your writing, work and reporting. How important is that to both your work and the EHRP?
Yeah, it’s a huge part. I think I’m trying to make a media that reflects more people’s lived experience. And also try to keep people in the industry, like the freelancers didn’t necessarily go to the fancy schools or play by the rules. Because in the past they might have worked for US alternative weeklies which no longer exist, and they’re struggling to get by on very low word-rates. Partly that’s because I’m usually more interested in their perspective, and partly that’s for keeping a radical and democratic viewpoint activated. To have people who have skin in the game, or have people who are still poor to be writing on it.
We touched on the form of journalism earlier. Discussing nonfiction journalism, you’ve said previously it can be very effective, there’s an interiority that’s quite easy to access with writing that you don’t get in other forms. But also you’ve written for CJR and you’ve tried to push journalism beyond its limits—drawing on traditions of reported poetry, of Objectivist methods, of pursuing truth in different forms. I wonder, what do you see as the future of the longform journalism mode?
That’s interesting. I don’t know what the future is, because I’m worried about its affordability. But in some ways, the imagination is growing. One thing I’ve been looking into and writing about are the cooperatives like Flaming Hydra, Hell Gate, Defector. There’s a whole slew of these worker co-ops where writers have control over the apparatus. And also journalistic mutual aid, where people are raising money for reporters who are laid off and giving moral support. That’s taking off a little bit. Then there’s the nonprofits, like the kind that we run, and many more. So that’s the future to me. It’s a recognition, as [media scholar] Victor Pickard said, that capitalism and journalism were always a match made in hell.
You’ve also published collections of poetry. I wonder how you see your poetry as complimentary, or not, to your nonfiction writing?
Well, I tend to like things to be super-intersectional. Not just thematically but also aesthetically. So that’s part of why I like documentary poetry—the poetry enter the documentary, and the documentary enter the poet—to have reimagined nonfiction in that way. And reimagined poetry too. Because poetry is not often successfully activist or grounded in everyday life. And journalism can often lack imagination and lack the spirit of otherness and wildness of poetry. I feel like they can benefit from each other from these genre interventions. Definitely a lot of [my poetry] is reported, or it’s about things like, you know, a mammogram, which I’ve never read poems about.
Yeah, well I think for writing to be breaking the rules, or testing the limits of form, is always to be encouraged.
I’m really impressed when people do it. There’s a number of people doing imaginative nonfiction and poetry, and vice versa, that I’m super into. I did a sonnet, that was reported, on climate change. It’s almost like an experiment. What would happen if we put these themes into a sonnet? The last experiment I did was with Mark Bittman, the cookbook writer, and I had this idea to do reported recipes. Radical recipes that were affordable, it says exactly how much the ingredients cost, how many minutes it takes, and how to prioritize environmental and animal justice in ingredients when you don't have a lot of money. To me that’s kind of cool, and not what you’d think of as traditional journalism.
Finally, you mentioned your belief that there’s a better storyline out there than the American dream, one that isn’t ‘simply a lonely, faltering, and often doomed trudge toward personal financial victory.’ In the course of your reporting for Bootstrapped, and in your work with journalists covering inequality, have you found those alternative storylines? How to we try and realize them?
Things I really like that [EHRP] runs are not necessarily the investigations. I mean I love when people uncover malfeasance, we had a great piece on eviction courts and housing. But I like when people write pieces about parts of working-class life that we may not know about. Someone was writing about cultures around fishing in Appalachia, getting at beauty as well. Someone wrote about a recipe that was based on really cheap ingredients that was handed down in her family. We’ve had a poet write about the beauty of a town in West Virginia, which was also a photo essay. It was beautiful. These are people who are poor but are writing in ways you don’t often see, capturing moments of bliss or specificity. Those stories give a different narrative around poverty, where it’s not just pain and damage.🗨️