By Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, February 19, 2020
Back in the 1800s, the expression “pull oneself up by the bootstraps” meant the opposite of what it does now. Then it was used mockingly to describe an impossible act.
An 1834 publication ridiculed a claim to have built a perpetual-motion machine by saying that the inventor might next heave himself over a river “by the straps of his boots.” An 1840 citation scoffs that something is “as gross an absurdity as he who attempts to raise himself over a fence by the straps of his boots.”
Yet this phrase has become part of America’s mythology and the centerpiece of our approach to help those left behind: We harangue them to lift themselves up by the bootstraps. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this month dismissed bootstrapping at a congressional hearing as “physically impossible,” outrage reverberated across the conservative media world.
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