A century after the publication of The Great Gatsby, the American Dream remains a central — if increasingly fractured — ideal in the national imagination. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel captured, with uncanny prescience, the hollowness at the heart of that dream: a desire fuelled not by attainable goals but by longing for a past that never truly existed. This myth has returned in political form, most potently through the slogan “Make America Great Again” — a nostalgic fantasy of renewal that, like Gatsby’s green light, always recedes just out of reach. Both dreams — literary and political — are sustained not through truth or progress, but through symbolic exclusion and, ultimately, sacrificial violence.

René Girard, a French historian and literary theorist, developed a powerful framework for understanding how societies resolve conflict through collective violence and ritualised exclusion. In recent years, his work has found resonance in certain Silicon Valley circles. Among the most prominent political figures to draw from Girard’s ideas is Vice President J.D. Vance.

Girard’s theory is a powerful interpretive framework, one that applies not only to ancient myth but to modern political behaviour as well. At the heart of his work is the concept of mimetic desire — the idea that human beings do not desire in isolation but imitate the desires of others. This imitation leads to mimetic rivalry, as individuals and groups compete for the same symbolic objects: status, belonging, love, or identity. As mimetic conflict escalates, society experiences growing disorder, anxiety, and fragmentation.

This mechanism, while ancient, is easily recognisable today, from the political scapegoating of immigrants to moral panics about cultural change. In contemporary politics, mimetic desire inflames social tensions — for example, when cultural symbols like national identity, traditional family values, or freedom of speech become battlegrounds for rival groups. People want these things not purely for their inherent value, but because others appear to want them. The more contested they become, the more mimetic desire intensifies, escalating rivalry.

To resolve this instability, Girard argued, societies unconsciously rely on what he called the scapegoat mechanism. In moments of social crisis, the community unites by projecting its tensions onto a single individual or group. This scapegoat is blamed for the disorder and cast out, often through violence. The sacrifice restores temporary peace and is remembered not as a crime but as a moment of purification. In ancient myth, the scapegoat is portrayed as guilty, and their punishment is framed as necessary for the restoration of order.

In the myth of Oedipus, the eponymous figure is exiled to cleanse Thebes of a plague — not because of deliberate wrongdoing, but because fate led him to unknowingly fulfill a taboo. His exile serves the city as a ritual act of purification, not a moral judgment. Oedipus himself undergoes a profound moral reckoning. He blinds and banishes himself not because the crowd demands it, but because he cannot bear the weight of his unintended crimes. The tragedy lies in this dissonance: the community seeks a scapegoat, while Oedipus seeks justice.

In ancient Greece, the pharmakos ritual involved selecting a marginalised person — often a beggar, criminal, or disabled person — to be expelled or killed during times of crisis. This act was meant to purify the city by transferring its misfortune onto a scapegoat. The victim’s innocence was irrelevant; their social status made them a convenient vessel for blame. These rituals offered not justice, but catharsis, and by framing the violence as necessary for order, they preserved the illusion that it was righteous.

Girard’s breakthrough came in recognising the role of the Gospels as a counter-narrative to the foundational myths of scapegoating. In myth, the scapegoat is depicted as guilty — Oedipus breaks taboos, the pharmakos is already socially deviant — and their punishment is portrayed as necessary for restoring order.  However, in the Christian account of Jesus’s crucifixion, we encounter something radically different: the victim is explicitly innocent, and the violence against him is shown to be unjust.

Jesus is accused of blasphemy by the religious authorities — specifically the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council — and handed over to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, on charges of claiming kingship and potentially inciting rebellion during a politically volatile time, as crowds gathered in Jerusalem for Passover. The fear was not of Jesus’s violence, but of his symbolic disruption: his popularity, his challenge to established authority, and his perceived threat to Roman control. Both religious and political institutions participate in his condemnation, and the gathered crowd ultimately demands his crucifixion. In this sense, he fulfils the role of a scapegoat perfectly: framed as a threat to peace, sacrificed to preserve order, and abandoned by nearly all. But unlike myth, the Gospels do not justify this violence — they reveal it.

They narrate the betrayal, the mob’s frenzy and the silence of bystanders, exposing the mechanism by which communities unite through collective blame. Most strikingly, Pilate declares Jesus’s innocence multiple times: “I find no guilt in this man” (Luke 23:4). He later insists, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; it is your responsibility!” (Matthew 27:24). As he symbolically washes his hands before the crowd, this gesture becomes a performative attempt to absolve himself of guilt.
Like Oedipus, Judas is overcome with guilt. In both cases, the response is not public defiance but deep, personal anguish. Judas confesses openly and tries to undo what cannot be undone:

When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”
“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”
So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. (Matthew 27:3–5)

Both Judas and Oedipus respond with self-inflicted punishment — one with suicide, the other with blinding and exile. Their guilt is not abstract; it is internalised and total. What they cannot bear is not judgment from others, but the knowledge that the person they harmed was innocent.

The resurrection further subverts the logic of scapegoating: it vindicates the victim and exposes the complicity of those who demanded Jesus’s death. Once this revelation enters human consciousness, Girard argues, the scapegoat mechanism can no longer function invisibly. It becomes visible, contested, and morally charged.
The unsettling quality of Vance’s political project lies in its lucidity — it does not stumble blindly into scapegoating but harnesses it knowingly. Rather than renounce the logic of scapegoating, Vance appears to weaponise it. His rhetoric consistently constructs a narrative of cultural decay brought about by morally suspect outsiders: “childless cat ladies,” “woke elites,” immigrants, and trans people. In a 2021 speech, Vance said:

“We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. Professors are the enemy.”

To be sure, not all those drawn to Vance’s politics are simply seduced by scapegoating or blinded by nostalgia. Many are responding to real dislocations: the collapse of manufacturing towns, the opioid crisis, the loss of community institutions, and a sense of cultural displacement in an age of rapid change. These are not imagined grievances, and any honest politics must reckon with them. The danger lies not in acknowledging pain, but in how that pain is directed — whether towards solutions or towards blame.

In interviews and campaign appearances, Vance has elaborated on these themes: portraying urban liberal elites as hostile to traditional families, casting undocumented immigrants as vectors of crime, and accusing progressive educators of indoctrinating children. These are not isolated claims but elements of a cohesive sacrificial narrative. They identify a group to be blamed, rejected, and symbolically expelled, thereby offering his followers a sense of unity, clarity, and catharsis.

To understand the cultural and emotional power of this politics, we can situate it within a broader mythology of the American Dream, one famously captured in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is the quintessential figure of mimetic desire. He does not simply love Daisy; he loves what she represents: social acceptance, legitimacy, and an elusive version of the past. The green light at the end of her dock — shimmering, unattainable — becomes a symbol of that longing and of the dream itself.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

The dream is not a material goal but a nostalgic illusion — a return to a lost greatness. Nick tells him: “You can’t repeat the past.” Gatsby insists: “Why of course you can!” The green light symbolises an idealised version of something he once had — or thinks he had — but which was always shaped more by longing than reality. Like “Make America Great Again,” it is a fantasy of restoration: vague, idealised, and ultimately exclusionary. Gatsby, despite his wealth, is never accepted by the old-money elite. His efforts to transcend class through performance, parties, and spectacle mark him as an outsider. When Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson, Gatsby takes the blame. His death preserves the illusion of social order. Tom and Daisy, the true agents of destruction, retreat into wealth and impunity:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Gatsby is not punished for wrongdoing; he is sacrificed for believing in a dream that was never meant for him. In a quiet parody of the Gospels, Gatsby dies for their sins.
Like The Great Gatsby, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible shows how communities demand victims to protect illusions. Written in response to McCarthyism, Miller’s play uses the Salem witch trials to expose how communities channel anxiety into ritual accusation. Like Gatsby, John Proctor is innocent — but unlike Gatsby, he chooses to resist. In one of the play’s most poignant lines, he pleads:

“I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

Proctor’s refusal is a rejection of the mechanism itself. His name represents more than identity; it signifies truth in a society addicted to false catharsis. His death is an act of moral clarity — he chooses to die rather than lend his name to a ritual of collective deception. Gatsby, by contrast, does not reject the communal lie; he dies within it, still believing in Daisy, in the dream, and in the promise of acceptance. Yet his death serves a parallel function. By clinging to the illusion of the American Dream, Gatsby exposes its cruelty. He becomes the necessary sacrifice that allows the elite to maintain the appearance of order. In both cases, the death of an innocent sustains a collective illusion.

The Valley of Ashes — that bleak industrial wasteland between West Egg and New York, described in The Great Gatsby — is more than a zone of transit. It is the graveyard of the dream: the place where its promises turn to dust. Fitzgerald describes it as “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” It is the site of Myrtle’s death, but also the setting for Tom Buchanan’s affair — a zone of exploitation, secrecy, and decay, far from the polished façades of the Eggs. The people who live there, like George Wilson, serve the dreams of others without ever participating in them. It is the landscape of sacrifice, a symbolic dumping ground. MAGA promises to resurrect a lost greatness, but what if that greatness always required such a valley — a place to bury the dream’s human cost?

Gatsby’s sacrifice carries a different moral texture than that of the Gospel scapegoat. Christ’s innocence is made visible: his death exposes the crowd’s violence and invites a reckoning. Gatsby, by contrast, dies without revelation. He accepts his role in the illusion, even welcomes it, never fully grasping the forces that have made him expendable. His passivity makes him a more tragic figure, not a lesser scapegoat.
The “green light” —just out of reach —finds political form in MAGA. Here too, it functions mimetically: not because it offers a concrete vision of what is to be restored, but because it reflects and amplifies the desires of others. Its appeal lies in its ambiguity. Each follower projects onto it a personal version of lost greatness: the innocence of small-town America, or the promise of unchecked economic opportunity. Its symbolic elasticity is its power. MAGA unites through longing rather than specifics, functioning not as a programme of governance but as a ceremony of memory. It invites not action, but yearning.

But mimetic desire, once awakened, is insatiable. And like all mimetic longings, this dream generates rivals. The elusive ideal of national restoration begins to feel obstructed: someone must be preventing it! The contemporary scapegoat need not be physically executed; symbolic death suffices. The activist, the technocrat, the foreign investor, the university president, the government department — each becomes a convenient figure upon whom to pin the blame for why the dream remains just out of reach. The dream’s continued failure only strengthens the desire and sharpens the demand for a target. So the cycle renews itself. A scapegoat is offered, sacrifice is rationalised, and the old promise — unity through exclusion, renewal through blame — is restaged once again, under the familiar glow of the green light.

“Make America Great Again” is less a slogan than a sacrificial formula: greatness is recovered only through the symbolic purging of those who supposedly made it fall.
Where remorse does appear in myth and scripture, it marks a turning point — a confrontation with guilt once the innocence of the victim becomes clear. Oedipus blinds himself; Judas takes his own life. Today, there is no such reckoning.

The most unsettling possibility is not simply that Vance engages in scapegoating, but that he does so with full awareness of its origins and consequences, even if his followers do not. This asymmetry, between a leader who understands the dynamic and a public who experiences only its emotional rewards, makes the politics of blame more manipulative. It reflects what Girard feared most: a world in which sacrifice persists not in ignorance, but with moral consciousness.

Watching over all of this is the faded billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg — “blue and gigantic… his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.”

To George Wilson, they represent God — a final trace of moral authority in a godless landscape. But the eyes do not speak; they do not intervene. They are witnesses without judgment: passive, unblinking, enduring. The violence unfolds beneath them, not blindly, but by the quiet consent of indifference.

One hundred years after Gatsby’s green light first shimmered, America is still chasing dreams of redemption through exclusion. We are no longer rowing in ignorance. The current is familiar, and the ritual is known. And still we row — towards a greatness that never was, and a victim already chosen.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”