After a campaign based on bringing prices down, the Trump administration has had to reverse course. 

But, as we all saw in the Oval Office with the revered war hero, Ukrainian President Zelensky, with whom the course has been reversed as well, and who had therefore suddenly to be branded as ungrateful and needing to resign, switching sides, whether from democracy to dictatorship, or from low prices to high, requires a bit of doing. Some public display. 

Inventive twists in rhetoric completely divorced from reality help too.

Luckily, no invention is beyond this administration. Consider the complete and total turnaround on the lower prices promise accomplished last week. 

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent before the Economic Club in New York City. 

Mr. Bessent’s choice of words was startling in two ways. First, cheap goods became a substitute for the American Dream a long time ago. Second, he fronts a government that is aggressively dismantling the whole American Dream thing right before our eyes.

Regardless, Mr. Bessent plunged ahead, unafraid to define what the American Dream once meant. “That any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, economic security.” 

Leaving aside for the moment the fraught word “citizen,” the promise of America was once of meritocracy. A free and unstratified country where anyone, of any race, religion, orientation, gender, creed, or, crucially, social class, could access the education and the opportunity necessary, alongside hard work, dedication, and integrity, to ascend to positions of trust and influence. 

Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin. All are representatives of the American Dream, which defined a New World of equal opportunity against the monarchies and aristocracies of the Old.

Employing the language of the American Dream despite his government’s gleeful destruction of the conditions required to achieve it is an offensive piece of posturing. 

The MAGA administration treats DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — the same way we used to treat the KKK —as something truly hideous that must be done away with at once. The KKK was a leftover of the darkest days in American history: the civil war and, before it, two and a half centuries of slavery. The current administration seems to want to bring those dark days back.

DEI is a sophisticated version of what used to be called affirmative action. Both are important efforts to create the conditions for meritocracy. They remove the barriers that keep people back. 

Mr. Bessent brought up the American Dream in order to frame a dismissive reference to “cheap goods.” Much hinges on those. Trump and Vance got elected on the price of eggs. A poorly educated underclass justifiably worried about every cost of living leapt at the promise of better economic conditions. People far, far away from access to education and good quality jobs. People for whom material stuff, when it can be had, must substitute for actual quality of life. 

But they are not alone. We have all been sold on, we are all hooked on, cheap goods. Nobody is immune to this contemporary plague. I am, I admit, a dedicated, a repeat offender. I hate shopping. I make it a policy to get what I need as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible. I have, on occasion, I am ashamed to admit, even bragged about the good deals I’ve discovered, how cheaply I got something.

The era of cheap goods rests on global trade regimes that undercut the quality of life at home, in local communities and across entire countries. We knew this, but we ignored it. Floods of cheap television sets, free streaming, precarious gigs working for apps, and all the riches endlessly available for a single click or two on digital platforms made that way too easy. 

We have been trained to consider price alone. To buy the cheapest things, look for the “best deals,” in big box stores, like Walmart and Costco and, increasingly, on Amazon — a platform that ruthlessly destroys the smaller companies that trade on it. 

We have come to expect zero in the way of moral or ethical considerations from the companies, and the countries, we nevertheless patronize, even if they deny workers the right to unionize, never mind exploit child labour. 

We go ahead and buy. 

Buy in, you mean. 

The internet enables this ethical undercutting. It offers both a world, and a way of seeing, in which everything is for sale and anyone can be bought. As if we were all part of some giant market. As if that is all there is. 

The events of the past few weeks have brought into clear view what has been lost over the past 20 or 30 years of “neoliberal” economic policies, which dismantle democracy by putting capital first. 

If democracy and capitalism are supposed to work hand in hand, reinforcing each other’s basic principles — freedom and equal opportunity — well, capital has been leading the dance for decades now. Governance as a public trust, the sanctity of the rule of law, the clear eyes of an independent press — these foundations of democracy have been whittled away in the name of capitalism and free markets in every country around the globe. 

We are suddenly seeing the consequences.

Values, principles, integrity, and ethics have all gone by the wayside, hidden in cloud computing and the deliberately mystifying structures of global monopoly capital.

DEI and affirmative action helped us to dismantle gender stereotypes, white privilege, and Indigenous erasure. It’s time to start dismantling the regime of cheap goods. 

Spend wisely. Shop carefully. Think local. Look, think, pause, reflect. Act for your community, as for your country. One day at a time, with every precious dollar. Spend a little more, if you can, for the things that matter.

Money is power, and we are now seeing that power unmasked, naked and exposed as never before. But that power is also ours. Consumer power is a vast, untapped resource that must be brought to the current crises.

Power rests with people. That is the story of democracy. Markets do, too. Vote with your dollars. Insist on decency, equality, integrity. Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. 

Any dream worth having rests on these alone.