Rick Jackson claims to be a self-made man. Let’s unpack this American myth.
In his endorsement of Rick Jackson for governor in an AJC guest opinion column, Democratic consultant Billy Linville echoes the story Jackson has made central to his candidacy: abandoned by his father, raised by a mother struggling with alcoholism and shuffled through foster care, Jackson worked his way from poverty to extraordinary business success.
For Linville, Jackson’s “life and struggle are a window into his character.”
Jackson’s campaign narrative invokes one of the oldest American myths — the self-made man, whose resilience, hard work and self-reliance overcome circumstance. His biography thus becomes a character argument for his fitness to govern. But the lessons of one exceptional life are a dangerous standard for governing 11 million Georgians.
The self-reliance Jackson stakes his candidacy on — “Like Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything” or “I’ve got this” — likely served him well in business, where autonomy and decisiveness are valued. But what virtues does democratic governance require?
Democracy assumes that no one governs alone and that nobody is king. A governor exercises power not as an owner but as a steward, sharing governance with a legislature he cannot control while remaining accountable to courts and voters. Self-reliance is a personal virtue; interdependence is a democratic one. Jackson has mastered the first. His campaign hasn’t shown he understands the second.
Jackson overcame extraordinary circumstances, but not alone
The way Jackson constructs his self-made story reveals a blind spot. His successes come richly contextualized: poverty, abandonment, foster care, maternal alcoholism — context that makes his resilience seem exceptional.
But in his political ads, his mother functions as a foil, reduced to the alcoholism and instability he transcended, with no attention to the circumstances she could not overcome.
The contextual generosity Jackson extends to himself disappears when he turns to adults — whether constrained by addiction, trauma, lack of education or poverty. He recognizes constrained agency in the foster children he has supported. Yet struggling adults become caricatures who “sit on” their “butts, binge watch Netflix and scarf down Cheetos.”
Context makes his achievement exceptional; stripping it from others makes their struggles look like failures of character. For a governor, that blind spot has consequences, shaping whose hardship merits care and whose merits judgment. A politics that should ask, “What do we owe one another?” risks becoming “Why couldn’t you do what I did?”
What Jackson’s self-made mythology leaves out is also revealing. “Nothing was handed to me,” he writes in campaign materials. “I worked my way up from nothing.” But the AJC’s 2015 profile, “The Self-Made Philanthropist,” tells a fuller story: a disabled uncle on public assistance paid to get him to safety; foster parents gave him a stable home and later welcomed him back; a social worker directed him to the United Methodist Children’s Home when he needed refuge; and a mentor he sought out at Georgia State remained involved in his business ventures for decades.
Jackson overcame extraordinary circumstances, but he did not overcome them alone.
We remain drawn to leaders claiming sole authorship of their success
The danger of the self-made ethos becomes concrete in Jackson’s “Dignity Through Work — Not Dependency” plank, which would tie public assistance to work or job training for “able-bodied adults” and make assistance “a bridge, not a lifestyle.”
The problem is not the aspiration to work; it is treating physical capacity as a proxy for self-sufficiency. “Able-bodied” tells us little about the parent caring full-time for a disabled child, the neurodivergent adult who cannot find suitable employment or the rural Georgian without access to jobs, transportation or healthcare.
These are constraints a work requirement does not remove and may instead punish. The same standard appears in Jackson’s proposed “intelligent Medicaid expansion”: he would measure success not by how many Georgians receive aid, but by how many move into jobs and private insurance.
Not every life follows Jackson’s trajectory; for some, sustained public support makes work, caregiving and a measure of independence possible. Jackson’s story makes self-reliance an achievement; translated into policy, it risks making self-reliance a prerequisite for care. Human dignity is antecedent to productivity, not a reward for it.
No one is self-made — not Jackson, nor any of America’s fabled heroes of individual success. Jackson’s fuller biography reveals a more human truth: what we make of our lives depends both on our own efforts and on the help of others.
Yet American politics remains powerfully drawn to leaders who claim sole authorship of their success, editing luck, circumstance and others’ generosity from the story. That mythology becomes dangerous when it becomes a governing philosophy.
Interdependence is not dependency — and policy for 11 million Georgians must be capacious enough for the lives the self-made myth elides.
Mary McCartin Wearn is a writer and former academic and nonprofit leader who most recently served as president of Georgia Humanities.
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