Politics & Power Quote by Jacob Hacker

There is a bait-and-switch baked into the American mythos, and Jacob Hacker leans into it: we worship self-reliance right up until life exposes how fragile self-reliance actually is. The line is structured like a confession. First, the creed: work hard, get ahead on your own. Then the interruption: disaster, retirement, disability. Those words aren’t abstract policy categories; they’re plot twists. They arrive whether you “deserve” them or not, which is precisely the point.

Hacker’s intent is to reframe social insurance not as charity but as the logical extension of the very values that supposedly oppose it. He’s not arguing against ambition; he’s arguing against the fantasy that effort is a shield. The subtext is blunt: the “on your own” story works best for people who never get tested by illness, injury, layoffs, or age. Everyone else is quietly living in the gap between the ideology and the reality.

Calling for “Americans as a whole” to “come to their aid” also sidesteps the moralizing language that often poisons this debate. It’s not “handouts,” it’s membership dues for a society that knows catastrophe is evenly distributed over time, even if it hits unevenly in the moment. In a culture that loves winners, Hacker makes dependence sound less like failure and more like an honest accounting of the human condition: independence is real, but it’s temporary, and it’s never fully solo.