Politics & Power Quote by Florence King

King skewers the American Dream by treating it less like an aspiration than a sedative. The line lands because it flips the Dream’s usual posture - alertness, striving, self-invention - into a kind of mass narcosis. “Fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be” needles two sacred American impulses at once: the self-help mythology of unlimited becoming and the language of entitlement. King’s jab isn’t that people want better lives; it’s that the wanting has been converted into a private, immersive theater that substitutes for noticing what’s breaking in plain sight.

“Asleep at the switch” is an old industrial metaphor, the nightmare of the inattentive operator whose lapse derails the system. That choice matters: she’s not describing isolated personal failure but a collective infrastructure problem. When citizens retreat into individualized dreamwork, no one is minding the machinery - institutions, public norms, even basic competence. The “Consequently” is pure King: a curt causal chain that refuses comforting complexity. If everyone is busy narrating their potential, the default outcome is not progress but preventable mistakes.

“Age of Human Error” is the kicker: a parody of grand historical labels (Age of Reason, Age of Anxiety) that blames not fate or villains but everyday negligence scaled up to national consequence. It’s cynicism with a moral edge. King is warning that a culture trained to romanticize the self can become uniquely vulnerable to bungling - because the work of reality is unglamorous, shared, and requires waking up.