Rude Awakenings
'The Great Gatsby' exposed the dark side of America decades before the 2024 election. But some folks are about to have their eyes opened to its lessons for the very first time.
On April 10th of next year—80 days into Donald Trump’s second term as president—The Great Gatsby will celebrate its 100th birthday. Only a few will care about this. Fewer still will recognize that Gatsby is not only news that’s stays news but a distant mirror that reflects disturbing truths about the present.
On the surface, ‘Gatsby’ is about a love triangle
There’s a beautiful girl and the young soldier who loves her. Unfortunately, she’s wealthy, and he’s too poor to marry her. When they meet again years later he’s a millionaire, but she’s already married to a polo-playing member of her own class.
When the novel opens, we also meet an attractive celebrity golfer and the story’s narrator—the evaluating consciousness—who tells their story.
Though born with everything most Americans long for but will never have—we can’t all be one-percenters—the husband is never satisfied. He’s a bully and a womanizer, who cheats on his wife during their honeymoon. He’s also a racist who speaks openly about the necessity of white supremacy.
Three years into their marriage, the polo player is still cheating, this time with the wife of a mechanic, a hardworking fellow barely able to make ends meet. Clueless about his wife’s affair, he idolizes the polo player, who is essentially a murderer, though he doesn’t pull the trigger himself.
But spoiler alert—this louse wins the day. He gets the girl, keeps his money, and moves on, free to do whatever he wants all over again.
They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
The Great Gatsby is a disturbing portrait of the dark side of the American Dream. The rich ride roughshod over everyone—and win. The poor are duped, victimized, and easily disposed of. Celebrity may be good for magazine covers but ultimately proves hollow. Truth, beauty, and an impossible dream are annihilated. By the end of the story, the narrator is so appalled he wants the world to remain in a state of permanent moral attention.
The polo player as president
Change polo to golf, and it doesn’t take much to see that the newly elected 47th president of the United States bears a strong resemblance to the husband in Fitzgerald’s novel. Born wealthy, he’s also a bully, a womanizer, and a putative racist.
He’s also careless. Spews falsehoods by tens of thousands. Incites an attack on the Capitol, plots to overthrow an election, covers up hush-money payments to a porn star, and fraudulently reports property valuations to get better interest rates and avoid taxes. He’s even found guilty of sexual abuse and separately for libel.
The list is nefarious and well known—hardly a resume for the highest office in the land. But just like the wealthy villainous husband in Gatsby —he gets away with it all. And returns to the Oval Office, the most powerful position in the world. Where the nuclear arsenal, the fate of America, and the future of the international order now rest in the short-fingered hands of this vulgarian.
If your news comes from mainstream media, you can recite this list in your sleep. But if it comes from Fox, NewsMax, One America News and a bevy of right-wing social media accounts—you either don’t know this stuff, don’t believe it, or have internalized a string of talking points that get repeated ad nauseam across the entire right-wing spectrum. That is the power of consistent branding.
It is preposterous that after 248 years, this great nation should find itself in such a pickle. But it’s no joke. In election-day exit polls, 40% of Trump voters said they voted for him because they wanted a complete shakeup of the status quo. Tragically, most of them don’t realize they’ve been played.
Which makes them a lot like that duped mechanic in Gatsby, strung along by the careless rich guy, while all along he’s sleeping with the mechanic’s wife. But this year, it’s as if the mechanic is in on the joke. He knows what happened on January 6th, but he closes his eyes and lets the bastard into his life again anyway.
Trump voters are not stupid
They're victims of a powerful propaganda machine over multiple platforms, which speak with one voice. And they've just voted against their own interests—again.
They live in a world of alternative facts, served up by Fox News and the rest of the right-wing ecosystem including Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ever since the campaign began two years ago, that ecosystem framed the president-elect in a way that syncs with a longstanding key agenda of the Republican Party — small government, deregulation, and the privatization of education, Medicare, and Social Security.
In other words, dismantle the New Deal and the Great Society. They cost too much. Why should hardworking taxpayers fund a social safety net? Surely the free market can do these things better. It’s the same laissez faire ethos epitomized by Calvin Coolidge during Gatsby’s Roaring Twenties: The business of America is business. Period.
But who would vote for you if you came right out and proposed a heartless agenda like that? Nobody. So you focus on divisive issues. Gay marriage, abortion, crime, gun rights, DEI, transgender rights, and illegal immigration. Above all, you vilify the other side. These things can get you elected. When you win, you can finally get on with implementing the agenda you’ve been keeping in the background all along. And in 2024, that agenda includes Project 2025. Surprise!
In The Great Gatsby, the poor mechanic never realizes how badly he’s been played. But he certainly understands what he’s lost after his wife is killed by a car driven by the careless wife of the polo player. At least Trump voters can do him one better. They’ll realize not only what they’ve lost but just how badly they’ve been duped.
They’ll realize it when the GOP goes after Medicare and Social Security. When they come after birth control and the right to privacy. They’ll realize it when there’s no more Head Start. They’ll feel it when the promise of “no taxes on overtime” turns out to be “restrictions on overtime.” They’ll realize it when the expected renewal of the 2017 tax cut is neutralized by tariffs and the higher prices they bring.
Perhaps they won’t mind too much because they voted for a man they feel connected to. He talks their talk, makes them feel his anger is also their anger. It’s a visceral connection. They like him. And that’s enough. Besides, he must be doing something right if his enemies worked so hard to silence him with jail and attempted assassination.
But for all that, most of his supporters were ignorant of his policies. When asked their opinion about specific issues—without being told whose they were— Trump voters generally favored proposals in the Kamala Harris plan.
The rich are different
F. Scott Fitzgerald understood one reason for this idolatry. “The rich are different from you and me,” he said. The American Dream is based on the belief that they can become different like that too. In America, anyone can become rich and successful if they work hard enough. Just look at that hillbilly who went to Yale, wrote a bestseller, and is now vice-president elect.
And yet each night Jay Gatsby stands at the foot of his dock in unfashionable West Egg reaching for the unattainable green light on the other side. It’s a futile gesture. Regardless of his wealth, he will never be accepted by the careless, upper-class snobs who live there. He will never be one of them.
Many Americans now face Gatsby’s predicament as they reach across a political chasm toward family members who reject the gesture. It’s a divide that cuts through marriages and threatens friendships.
With Thanksgiving and Christmas just around the corner, a Yale psychiatrist recently said it’s essential to set boundaries if your family members voted for Trump and you are LGBTQ+ or a woman who feels triggered by misogynistic language.
She added that it’s alright to say, “I have a problem with the way you voted because it went against my very livelihood, and I’m not going to be around you this holiday. I need to take some space for me.”
Within context, that doesn’t sound unreasonable. But right-wing media pounced on the statement, twisting its meaning and reframing it to fit their agenda. For example, the Fox News headline reads: Yale psychiatrist says it’s ‘essential’ for liberals to cut off Trump-voting loved ones during the holidays.
That headline is crafted to create outrage. It’s part of an ideological framework that knocks higher education and liberals in a single blow. That framework includes these right-wing top-40 hits:
Liberals are evil. Mainstream media is dominated by liberals and therefore evil. Universities are re-education camps controlled by leftists and also evil. Government is dominated by a liberal Deep State and cannot be trusted. Immigration is a plot by liberal Democrats to replace the white majority and establish a loyal demographic that will always vote for them.
All stories within the right-wing ecosystem must punch these themes in some way all the time, even if the original news event is unrelated. It’s called subliminal embedding — the lynchpin of all successful branding. As reliable as the ear worm in that Christmas song you’ll soon be hearing till the end of the year.
And that is exactly how we got here
Divisive rhetoric like this now sets the agenda for the rest of the country. It speaks with one voice across multiple print and broadcast platforms buttressed by hundreds of podcasts and social media accounts. Mainstream media hasn’t figured out how to defend itself or compete with this. They’re in competition with each other and do not speak with one voice.
All of which adds a new layer to the dark side of the American Dream. It’s not only dividing our country, it is breaking our families. People don’t have conversations anymore. They hurl talking points at each other.
Since the pandemic, I’ve attended the funerals of several friends and loved ones. During their final illnesses, not one of them mentioned politics. Not one talked about how they voted in the last election. Which says a lot about the reliability of our illusions.
The impoverished James Gatz could never pull off the charade of Jay Gatsby today. He’d be outed as a charlatan like the disgraced former congressman George Santos.
So it’s lucky that Gatsby had one friend who did not cut ties like everyone else after his downfall. Maybe that’s all we really need as we enter the second administration of a would-be dictator. Just one friend like Gatsby’s narrator who will not write us off without considering that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
And that it’s best to reserve judgment because reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope. No doubt we will need plenty of that hope for ballast as we beat on, boats against the current, borne back into a past piloted by a narcissist who never possessed the character or integrity to be president of the United States in the first place.
Let us raise a glass, then, and offer a toast to The Great Gatsby on its forthcoming centennial birthday as we prepare for the rude awakening the past has already shown us. You remember how it goes, don’t you? Those rollicking Roaring Twenties ended with a crash.
©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill / All rights reserved.
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Wow! Just wow! Thanks, Andrew. xo
Thank you for addressing this issue, Andrew. I’ll be sharing!