Have you ever known a friend who said, “Next year I’m moving to Rome and living the Italian Dream?” How about a buddy who over coffee declared, “I can’t stand this country anymore. I’m off to Ankara, where I can live the Turkish Dream?” Or an uncle who slapped his open hand on the table and said, “No more disappointments for me. Me and mine are flying out next month to Beijing so we can finally be happy living the Chinese Dream?”
No? Me neither.
The phrase “the American Dream” first appeared in print in James Truslow Adams’ 1931 bestseller, Epic of America. He described it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” He also noted, “It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motorcars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
Search online for “what is the American Dream?” and you’ll find some writers arguing that the Dream is alive and well, while others claim it bit the dust years ago. Unlike James Adams, a number of commentators on both sides of this debate equate the American Dream with owning a home and holding down a good job. Given that criteria, and given today’s economy, one might justifiably contend that the American Dream is indeed ready for its last rites. The high cost of a new house, the inflation rates on food and gas, the ever-widening gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor, Bidenomics, and our national debt are signs that this economic version of the American Dream is a battered wreck.
Personally, I never thought of the American Dream in material terms. Like lots of other people, for me, the Dream was more about those revolutionary words from the Declaration of Independence, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” It was about the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. It was about freedom.
Unfortunately, that concept of the Dream is also taking a bashing right now. Accelerated by the COVID mandates and lockdowns, government assaults on our liberties—including the quashing of free speech and the use of intimidation and misinformation to create fear and despair in our citizenry—have been enabled, in part, by a vast apparatus of electronic surveillance employed to track and discredit dissenters.
Intimately bound to the American Dream is the notion of American exceptionalism, which takes the view that the United States as founded differs from all the other countries of the world. In “Why American Exceptionalism Is Different From Other Countries’ ‘Nationalisms,’” Kim Holmes gives as good a definition as any of this exceptionalism: “It’s grounded in America’s founding principles: natural law, liberty, limited government, individual rights, the checks and balances of government, popular sovereignty, the civilizing role of religion in society, and the crucial role of civil society and civil institutions in grounding and mediating our democracy and our freedom.”
Today many would deny this notion that America is somehow set apart from other nations past and present. These people might take a look at Puritan John Winthrop’s “city on a hill sermon,” that short homily he delivered in 1630 which lays out the groundwork of what makes America different from so many other nations.
Others more validly claim that America is no longer the nation it was founded as. “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” John Adams once said. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Those who proclaim the death of these ideals point out that virtue and religious feeling are missing from both our government and our culture.
If it is the case that the American Dream and American values are dying or dead, we can expect to see dismal consequences in both our nation and in the world. Here the verse “Dreams” by American poet Langston Hughes give us a picture of that future:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
To avoid that barren field frozen with snow, Americans must again recollect and embrace their American Dream and restore the standards of virtue to their republic.
That is the daunting and most crucial task now facing our country.
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Image credit: Unsplash
2 comments
2 Comments
Kalikiano Kalei
February 27, 2024, 6:49 pmJeff, I would agree with your opinion that whatever the 'American Dream' ought to be, it oughtn’t properly be based in rampant consumerist material desires. 'Life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness' is the better and truer definition of that fundamentally democratic American slogan. However…
A few days ago, I tuned in to so-called 'free' commercial television media programming (really, just to confirm my conviction that it is absolutely execrable, even grievously insulting to any reasonably intelligent person) so as to gauge the nature of the conventional ‘woke’ wisdom that is being spoon-fed to us as a socio-politically correct normative model for all Americans to emulate.
Aside from the blatantly obvious leftward bias of almost all media that pervades television programming these days, it was impossible to not note the obsessive focus on black inclusion (a group that constitutes a mere 13%, more or less, of the total population) in commercial advertisements. Also painfully apparent was the absolutely abysmal quality of America media advertising and commercials, which are clearly aimed at an intellectually emasculated and dumbed-down audience that the elitists regard average Americans as being.
Recalling at that point several popular and widely read books that in recent years have astutely highlighted the pervasive ‘dumbing-down’ effect in schools and public educational institutions, I mused “Now why is this, in its greater context? What is to ultimately be gained from such active, formalised encouragement of ignorance and mediocrity in learning?’” (aside from making marginal students feel as if they deserve the same high regard and esteem as truly gifted students, of course).
I particularly noted the portrayal of characters portrayed by actors as simple, uncomplicated and gullible individuals in television programming and advertisements, concurrent with my reflecting further on the deliberate lowering of formerly high standards in schools (to make dummies think they are equals to rocket scientists?). It gradually began to dawn on me that the corporations, in harmony with the DEI/Woke ideologists and our educators appear to be working semi-covertly together to mold those who may still be able to think critically into the perfectly accepting, unquestioning and easily manipulated people they want us to be. People who, instead of being able to use their intellects to question artificially fabricated ‘conventional wisdom’, are more socially and economically compliant…the ideal norm of the masses in any truly authoritarian socialist society (such as Russia, China, North Korea, etc.).
History has shown us that thinking people will always insist, unless forcibly constrained, on retaining the basic individual freedom to exercise their intellect, whereas fully socialized (brainwashed) proletarian subjects pose a far lesser threat to those in power (which in our case, are those super-wealthy masters of our economy, e.g. the so-called elite 1% in whose hands most of the true wealth in America resides).
Very recently, polls revealed that a startlingly high percentage of leftists feel that “there is too much freedom in America”, concurrent with most conservatives feeling there is not enough. Could it be that we are all tacitly being brain-washed to become good little comrades who are willing to kowtow meekly to our economic masters, through their efforts to turn us all into blindly accepting, unthinking consumer clones?
Given the marked disdain these ‘masters of our economy’ appear to have for our collective intelligence, it would certainly seem so to me! All the more reason to throw off the insidious ‘debt slavery’ form of control those wealthy tech masters are imposing on us with their perverse, extreme model of omnipotent American corporate capitalism…
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness?” or “Enslavement by unconstrained materialist desire for needless material ‘things?’” We must decide, and soon…
REPLYWaggle
March 1, 2024, 7:25 amMy wife and I decided in 1993 to incorporate our. consulting firm in the USA. We then hired an American to get it off the ground. But he then offered to run the company from Scotland while his wife studied at a university there.
We then decided to sell up and move from the UK to live in Chester County as employees of our new company. I managed to secure a work permit but my wife did not. But we continued with our dream (much to the delight of our three children who had swiftly made good friends at their new schools).
My wife volunteered for all sorts of work she found interesting while caring for children.
We were fortunate enough to obtain a mortgage to buy our new home with large enough basement for us to headquarter our business. “Twice the home for half the money” was true.
Twenty years later we were US citizens, had found a successor to run the business from another state, our children were making us grandparents. We were ready to retire.
The American Dream worked well for us.
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