While scholars may debate what the American Dream truly means, for many, it represents the notion that anyone can find prosperity, success, and upward social mobility in America through hard work and grit. Like the ideas of liberty, justice, and freedom, the Dream seems firmly ingrained in American culture. We see and hear about the Dream all the time, stories of people obtaining success through hardship, perseverance, and just a bit of luck. We praise immigrants like Levi Strauss and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who came to America with nothing yet built fortunes and found fame. We look towards Silicon Valley, the hub of technology startups, and watch as entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg rise to prominence through sacrifice and risk-taking. Through these success stories that seem to span all the way back to the original colonists, those adventurous settlers who risked everything to come to the Americas, we are led to believe that America has always been the land of opportunity, a belief found in the American Dream.
However, for a phrase that fits so well into the nation’s founding narrative, the American Dream is surprisingly quite a recent invention. Although the Dream’s ideals are in the Declaration of Independence with its calls for unalienable rights such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the term, American Dream, is attributed to writer James Truslow Adams. Reacting to the growing inequality found during the Gilded Age when ultra-wealthy robber barons ruled over America, James wrote The Epic of America. In his book, he noted that the U.S. had taken a wrong turn, becoming overly consumeristic and unequal, especially in a “land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Essentially, a call for a democratic society less concerned with material consumption. Ironically, however, James’ American Dream has been subverted towards consumerist means over the last century. During the 1950s, in the wake of WW2 and the start of the Cold War, the Dream became a commercialized catchphrase to be packaged with the ideas of liberal democracy and exported abroad, an important soft power tool in the U.S.’s war against communism. While other countries began rebuilding after WW2, the largely untouched U.S. went through an era of prosperity and high economic growth. Rising wages along and a growing middle class also led to the development of a consumer culture that slowly began to associated with the American Dream. Unfortunately, however, while the commercialized American Dream has stayed prominent in popular culture, the economic prosperity that propelled the myth has mostly disappeared for the average American. For many Americans, both young and old, the growing wealth inequality has led many to believe the American Dream is dead, or at least out of reach. Unsurprisingly, this changing economic and social landscape has led to momentous consequences that deserve closer examination.
As this American Dream has become harder for the average American to obtain because of various factors such as globalization, automation, and economic downturns, many of us have become very disillusioned. The promise of America seems to be fading, but who is to blame? This all-important question of fault has led to an increasingly divided society. Many of us try to understand why we are not moving up the ladder and maybe moving down. My book review and analysis of the millennials’ economic woes show how this sentiment of decline is shared by people across various socioeconomic backgrounds, resulting in a growing sense of disillusionment. With my piece on polarization, I highlighted how the media could prey on this sentiment, feeding us news that caters to political biases and stoking the flames of an increasingly polarized society. Finally, through my essay on radicalism, I wanted to show that Americans can share common ground even in the extremes. All of us know that this country has so much wealth, yet currently, the vast majority do not get to share in this prosperity. Fighting to close this economic inequality requires Americans to accept their shared plights. While this specific e-zine highlighted how the declining American Dream impacts average Americans, I also hoped to show how many of us share the same worries and feel disheartened about the divided country. Although we might not completely understand each other’s perspectives, a good step toward healing America is to acknowledge our commonalities. A better step would be inspiring others to do the same.