This is from Obama’s last State of the Union address (via):

“And most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some special interest.

Too many Americans feel that way right now.”

As though they were wrong, as though feeling that way were the problem rather than, you know, the actual problem. This sort of feint is characteristic of Obama’s rhetoric. He identifies a real problem only to blame people who didn’t cause it for being “cynical” about it. The implication being that the whole thing is actually our fault for not hoping hard enough. This concept is the referent of the title of Obama’s campaign-hyping memoir The Audacity of Hope, and he occasionally likes to refer back to it by using the word “audacity” in this sense.

The problem is that this is the bad kind of audacity, and the bad kind of hope: not perseverance through adversity based on the belief that your efforts will eventually amount to something, but adherence to what you know to be a lost cause based on the fact that you have no other options. This is the kind of hope that precisely prevents problems from getting solved.

It’s the same hope that, among other things, motivates people to play the lottery. The lottery is not, as is often claimed, “a tax on people who are bad at math.” This implies that people who play the lottery are actually doing an expected value calculation, getting it wrong, and choosing to play on the basis of the results, which is clearly ridiculous; it also ignores the obvious non-linear utility of money. The people who come up with wacky stats about things that are more likely than winning the lottery are merely engaging in the standard college-educated-liberal tradition of pretending to be wise and thoughtful while actually just sneering at poor people (poor people foolishly gamble, rich people prudently invest). The truth, in fact, is worse: the lottery is a tax on hope.

Desperation is one thing, but much of the lottery hysteria comes from middle-class people who are actually fine but are still looking for their “big payday.” This is why attacking the lottery from a rational economic perspective misses the point: people like the lottery. I recently overheard someone saying that winning money is “the best feeling in the world.” One assumes/hopes this was ironic hyperbole, but this was a person who actually was playing the lottery; the sentiment was genuine. The fantasy, of course, is not really about money, but about being saved, about something else swooping down from the sky and solving all of your problems forever. This is why the “winning” aspect is important: what’s enjoyable is precisely the fact that you didn’t earn it.

Hence, the “American Dream” ultimately amounts to the desire to be able to fuck off and do nothing for the rest of your life. This is what people are actually dreaming about when they dream about winning the lottery. And if the only thing you really want out of life is to have “no problems,” to be “free” in the most trivial sense of the term, you’re a nihilist. Most Americans really can’t imagine anything more worthwhile than free money.

(Speaking of which, Patti Smith had her finger on this pulse 40 years ago. “Free Money” addresses precisely this fact: that money is only desirable to the extent that it actually lets you do things. The song’s fantastical positiveness negatively highlights the fact that money is not freedom, but rather lack of money is coercion.)

There is/was a lottery commercial where the powerballs or whatever they are are raining down from the sky, and somebody catches the winning one while faux-gospel music plays in the background. This literally portrays winning the lottery as salvation, which would seem to be as absurd an inversion as there ever was. But as with all commercials, what’s sickening about it is that it’s true: this is what Americans actually believe.

People who argue against the idea of America being a “Christian nation” are missing the forest for the trees. It doesn’t matter what percentage of people follow which religion, or what religion the “founders” were, what matters is that our national mythology is Christian mythology, adapted to the world of politics. “Manifest Destiny” is the same thing as the “Kingdom of Heaven.” Obama’s ascension was portrayed by liberals in explicitly messianic terms (and by conservatives in explicitly apocalyptic terms, which amounts to the same thing). He was the person who was going to “transcend” politics, to save America from itself. Recall, if you can stomach it, this asshole:

“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.”

The truth is that liberals actually did win the lottery when Obama was elected. They got their messiah. The reason Obama didn’t save the world is not because he wasn’t “tough” enough or because he “compromised” too much, but because there was no salvation to be had.

In Christian mythology, the second coming of Jesus, the culmination of history for which the world endlessly waits, does not herald an improvement or a revelation or even a purification. It heralds the end of the world. The great dream of Christianity is that someday, at long last, the world will stop existing, and the faithful will never have to worry about anything ever again. American politics subsists on this same hope: that one day a great leader will “fix” the government, such that everyone will agree on everything, and we’ll never have to engage in politics ever again.

Of course, this is impossible. Conservatives actually have a leg up on liberals here, because they recognize that conflicting politics cannot be reconciled. Liberals persist in the delusion that conservatives are “misguided,” that they’re being “mislead” by “demagogues,” that they’re “voting against their own interests.” The truth is that conservatives know exactly what they want. They don’t want economic security or health care or global stability. The reason they pursue symbolic victories is that they want a symbolic victory.

This is why the outcome to be hoped for from the primary elections is Sanders vs. Cruz. This would be a real battle, a genuine conflict of values. America would finally be forced to stop hiding behind civility and show its true colors. Yes, an extreme reactionary candidate would present a huge danger to the country. That’s the point. One who values truth courts danger, confident that the truth is strong enough to win through. Anyone who supports a candidate based on “electability” is a coward.

Playing the lottery is essentially the same form of cowardice. The winner gains the ability to circumvent their problems and not address them (obvious disclaimer: none of this applies to people who actually don’t have enough money to survive on. Meaning is a luxury; survival is the law). If you actually won the lottery, you’d tell your boss to fuck off, bask in a haze of giddiness for a few weeks, and then settle into a routine of obsessive money management on top of the usual life-wasting activities that you already engage in with your current amount of free time. You will not be saved.