The interviews in this article have been edited for greater clarity.
On April 16, 2024, Alissa Quart visited Raritan Valley Community College and gave a speech on the importance of interdependence. Quart is the founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. The organization’s stated goal is to amplify working-class voices that have traditionally been underrepresented.
Quart commenced her speech by mentioning how the American Dream can mean many different things to many different people. To reinforce this idea, she asked different people in the audience what they thought the American dream meant. Some in the audience said, “Starting a family,” “Ending generational curses,” and “Doing better than your parents.”
Another one of the speaker’s main arguments is that being self-made is an oxymoron because people rely on other people and resources to make their wealth. For example, workers make wealth, and people with better broadband, and education, for example, are more likely to succeed. She makes the case for this by pointing out how humans and other animals are interdependent by their very nature.
Quart also tried to promote the idea of the “Art of Dependence.” She wanted to detoxify the idea of being dependent on someone else for things as varied as transportation, government, and welfare services, and even our families. Quart also provided solutions to the ills she sees in society through ideas such as Medicare for all, worker-owned cooperatives, and greater unionization. Quart gave examples of left-wing politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders saying that no business was built by one person and that a political campaign takes multiple people to operate.
When Quart asked people in the audience who they depended on, Professor Laurie Reynolds responded, “They [my students] make me a better teacher and make me want to be the best that I can be.” I also asked her about what she thought about the Quart’s advocacy of universal healthcare as someone who lived under a universal healthcare system in France. She responded, “Each system has their perks like in France. everything’s free, which is great, but sometimes you have to wait approximately 6 months to see a doctor while you wait a couple of days if you have an urgent care situation.”
I saw these arguments as persuasive because the speaker successfully tried to tie her ideas into the lived experiences of the crowd in attendance. Quart also effectively tried to talk about the hypocrisy of those who advocated for self-reliance. For example, transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau relied on his mother for cooking and cleaning. In addition to that, even though the characters in “Little House on The Prairie” benefitted from the Homestead Act of 1862 and depended on their neighbors for crops, they were also conservative libertarians who disdained Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interventionist approach to the economy. Quart further mentioned writer Ayn Rand as a beneficiary of Medicare and Social Security, even though she despised those programs.
Overall, Quart was able to effectively engage her audience by having them critically examine their own views on both the American dream and what it means to be dependent on others. Most notably, Quart helped to encourage the audience to think of who they depend on in their own lives as Reynolds did.
