Politics & Power Quote by Mortimer Zuckerman

The line lands because it hijacks the most sacred myth in American consumer life and flips it into horror: dream into nightmare, waking into dread. Zuckerman isn’t just describing falling home prices; he’s describing a psychic breach. Home ownership isn’t framed as an asset class but as a moral achievement, “the home that has meant so much to them.” That phrase is doing heavy cultural work: it smuggles in identity, stability, status, and parental duty, so that a market correction reads like a personal humiliation.

As a publisher and public voice of the business-and-politics class, Zuckerman’s intent is pointedly political even when it sounds empathetic. “Millions of families” widens the aperture from individual bad bets to a national crisis, a move that supports arguments for intervention: easier credit, government backstops, regulatory fixes, or stimulus. The “wake every day” detail is strategic melodrama; it turns abstract numbers into an everyday lived experience, inviting readers to feel urgency rather than debate policy nuances.

The subtext is an indictment of the bargain America sold: tie middle-class security to a leveraged purchase and call it virtue. When that bargain collapses, the pain isn’t just foreclosure; it’s the unraveling of a promise that work plus prudence equals safety. The likely backdrop is the post-2008 housing crash, when values cratered, equity evaporated, and the public learned how quickly “ownership” can look like tenancy to a mortgage. Zuckerman’s rhetoric makes that lesson sting by treating the market as an intruder in the living room.