But Not For Us
In the Atlantic article “Americans Want to Be Rich” (April 9, 2025), Reihan Salam and Charles Fain Lehman argue that many “Trump voters” didn’t support him for his tariffs or policies. They supported him because they saw in him what Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1925) saw in that green light: a fast track to success. To them, Trump wasn’t a politician. He was a portal, a living symbol of the American fantasy that wealth equals freedom, safety, and power.
If Salam and Lehman are correct, we must continue to explore F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. And, that’s what we did in our April 4th Symphony ’77 Inquiry Circle. We gathered around a deceptively simple question: What if the dream we were taught to chase was never meant to be ours?
Jay Gatsby, with his fortune built on speculation and his eyes fixed on an unreachable green light, isn’t just a character—he’s an American archetype. And his story, far from being a romantic tragedy, is a case study in aspirational betrayal. Gatsby believed that wealth could buy him access, love, and legacy. He died discovering that the system he revered would never let him in.
Trumpism and the Gatsby Illusion
What Fitzgerald named in 1925, we now experience in 2025 in new form under Private Equity State Capitalism (PESC): a system that packages upward mobility as a product, sells it to the masses, and then pulls the ladder up before they can climb it.
We’ve entered a moment Salim and Lehman describe as an “anti-wealth consensus”—a recognition, even among believers, that the path to prosperity may be booby-trapped. It’s a 21st-century Gatsby moment: eerily, the dream is turning on its dreamers.
Gatsby, Reframed Through AfricanAmericanism
Through my lens AfricanAmericanism, I see Gatsby’s exclusion as personal and structural. While he sought access, Black Americans of the 1920s were building their own economic, artistic, and spiritual institutions, for example, the Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK. We were being systemically erased so that the American Fiction of the American Dream could continue to guide the country.. The same dream that denied Gatsby entrance was actively punishing Black self-determination.
From Green Light to Guiding Light
In Gatsby, the green light represents hope. But it was always a trick of the eye—distant, shifting, impossible to touch. As Salam and Lehman highlight, despite the counter-prevailing evidence, many still chase that light today, believing wealth will redeem their struggle.
Liberation Meditation: From Mirage to Movement
The real tragedy of Gatsby isn’t that he failed to win Daisy, but that he ever believed she—and the system she belonged to—was his prize?
In AfricanAmericanism, it’s important not to chase mirages. It’s crucial to dismantle illusions and build from truth. Don’t ask for permission. Seize clarity. Forge joy. Reclaim agency on every level—from the inner self to the outer systems.
As Salam and Leham suggest, it’s time to dream a New American Dream. To stop chasing an old dream and start becoming a new one.
So pause.
Ask yourself:
- What dreams have I inherited that were never meant for me?
- What myths have I outgrown?
- Where am I ready to stop waiting and start building?
The next century of our story is not about longing for inclusion. It’s about becoming architects of our futures—futures not lit by a distant green glow but by the fire we carry forward.
Gatsby and MAGA reach for the past.
We must reach beyond it.