The current American economy is based on the idea that there is a creative class of 50 million people that is always striving to create something more out of the country, and always failing. Covid only exaggerated this truth about life in America which has been true for my entire entire lifetime and has only gotten truer.
Globalization has, bizarrely, made American life more local than ever in living memory. I doubt that life in the US has been more local in the last hundred years than it's been in the early 21st century. On the one hand, everything is basically alike from town to town in amenities, on the other hand, everything is incredibly different and each place has its own personal spin on the same things.
On the one hand, you have these massive corporations that grow larger and larger that dominate every market - chain restaurants, stores that sell literally everything from clothing to hardware, record and film companies that provide blockbuster movies and concerts, and now, the behemoth of even online shopping and entertainment threatens to replace all that.
On the other hand, there are always these little sub-markets and niches which corporations cannot possibly keep up with; and these little restaurants and stores and songwriters and theater companies innovating from the flimsiest of utilities out of necessity and doing things that can be found literally nowhere else in the world. But making a living requires the backing of a company, or a government, or a civic organization. Without one of the three, it is, in the long run, impossible. Every prosperous person in the entire country knows that, but their outsize prosperity depends on the hand-to-mouth existence of the various weirdos they went to school with who exist outside their nine dots. Most of these people spend their existences in jobs for which they are unfit and live lives of quiet desperation. Eventually, they develop the credit score that they can get a small business loan to achieve their ambition, for which they rarely get more one shot. And, almost inevitably, their ambition fails, and back to decades of quiet desperation they go. And somehow, the country thinks this is a sustainable state of affairs that will not result in guaranteed civil unrest.
Every town in America has their own hidden places and communities which the town misfits have to construct entirely on their own. Every person in the country falls over themselves in competition to find those unique things nobody else knows about to which they can introduce their friends. And there are new ones constantly springing up, because the after two or three years, the older ones are constantly failing. In addition to all the colossal chain restaurants, there are always literally dozens of new restaurants in nearly every town in the US, most of which never last more than a couple years. The same goes for clothing stores, concert venues, bars and breweries, and interior decoration stores. Meanwhile, there are a colossal number of artists of all types that are trying to make careers and rarely ever succeed, some of which are far better than people with Hollywood contracts. Every city has hundreds of unsigned bands that have break up the moment they get good because they can no longer afford to rehearse. And there are literally thousands of independent films that are never seen anywhere but in film festivals. All this would no longer be true if there was any kind of meaningful subsidy at all for creative endeavors - whether this subsidy came from the government, from companies, or from some civic organizations, it almost doesn't matter - but the very idea of creative subsidy on American soil is a joke. Subsidies and grants are literally a cursory thing - something to point to to say that "we're doing something" while doing nothing at all.
How much of these creative achievements are truly great stuff? Well, some of it. Not enough frankly. But the lack of subsidy also means a lack of quality control. The real creative class is so busy trying to make ends meet, most of whom spend decades in full-time jobs, meanwhile devoting so much free time merely to marketing and self-promotion, or finding ways of standing out as different from the much larger competitors, that there is so little time left over for actual work. The quality inevitably suffers.
But the mere act of creating a small commercial business in America, of any type, at any point in one's life, is a subversive act. It is a declaration of rebellion against a system built to make us fail. There are literal millions of people here trying desperately hard to do it, but most of them can't, and they know that the reason is because the modern American system is designed around making sure they fail. There must be somewhere between 30 and 50 million Americans trying to make a creative living of some sort and failing, but it creates a truly huge community of solidarity between people who are trying to stay unique in a country where every pressure is on us to conform. This, as much as anything else, is why life in the United States of America is worth living and worth defending.
Without either corporate, governmental, or civic backing, it is so colossally difficult to create any security within a local market, that 90% of creative small businesses fold. Between occupancy expenses, marketing expenses, equipment and inventory expenses, costs of labor and payroll, to say nothing of personal living expenses that continually go up, there is no chance for people in creative jobs to make a living. Everyone with the power to change that knows it, but they would rather keep more money for themselves.
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