Is The American Dream Dead?
People love to debate the meaning of the American Dream. Can it be described? Can it be obtained? A masterful article by David Kamp appeared in the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair. Kamp says that while American opportunities remained strong through the 20th Century, our aspirations changed.
Most people don’t understand what the American Dream is supposed to be. After all, this is the land of confusion as Phil Collins sang. Without a concrete knowledge of what Americans should be or have, too many seekers overstepped the bounds of economic reality.
Kamp explains how for years most Americans sought a better life. Their dreams were often realized during the lives of their children. Successive generations continued to build on that foundation but simply maintaining the prosperity gave way to cravings for more. Those escalating aspirations coincided with extensions of easy credit that allowed regular folks to get more stuff. Bigger is better right?
If the American Dream means maintaining prosperity, then we are fine. The problem is that many people believe the goal is to have a better life than those who came before us. The tipping point came and went over the past 20 years and now we are stuck with the consequences.
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Films like The Godfather (#17) and the Pursuit of Happyness (#18) offer insight into two types of American searc
hes. In the former, the Corleones epitomize the rarest prominence, albeit through criminal means, available to immigrants of the 20th Century. In the latter, Will Smith portrays an unlikely struggle as a desperate father grinding every gear to escape the lower class lifestyle. Countless other films over the past few decades lead us on similar journeys in search of wealth or fame or prominence. These individualistic goals represent the break from an idealized American Dream that connected personal fulfillment with the benefit to others.
The dream disintegrated rapidly. The predominant ideal of the 1930s, thriftiness, gave way in the post-war era (1945-1960), an age of prosperity where colleges were filled with middle class entrants and garages were attached to homes to accomodate a second car. Far from the simpler violation of expecting a better life than one’s parents, most young people today grow up with an expectancy to strike it rich by becoming famous.
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During World War II, President Roosevelt articulated the American way through values immortalized by artist Norman Rockwell. These “Four Freedoms” symbolized what America was all about. They were Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. Kamp points out that today the ideal has become Freedom to Want. Entitlement is a part of modern thinking, the innate right to overabundance with our natural rights taken for granted.
Perhaps the real explosion of American want came with television, another frivolity that every American had to have shortly after the war. TV families showed off what every American household should look like. As Kamp points out:
“Nothing reinforced the seductive pull of the new, suburbanized American Dream more than the burgeoning medium of television…”
If television was the seed, consumer credit served as the Miracle Grow for the uninhibited consumerism that would alter the standard of American life from basic necessities to over the top excess. 
By the 1990s, Americans possessed more than ever yet at the same time were increasingly unfulfilled. The more Americans obtained, the less happy they became. Again quoting Kamp:
“The American Dream was now almost by definition unattainable, a moving target that eluded people’s grasp; nothing was ever enough. It compelled Americans to set unmeetable goals for themselves and then condisder themselves failures when these goals, inevitably, went unmet.”
Kamp concludes that the general contempt so many today hold for the middle class is misguided. “The middle class is a good place to be,” he says, it’s a level of living that surpasses those who came before us.
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Kamp’s piece is one of the best recent studies of who we are and how we think. He understands the trends that have brought us to this trap in between the rock of longing and hard place of unfulfillment. The initial solution he offers is to simply be content with stability and opportunity and freedom of choice.
The article is good but very long. Many readers might not stick with it until the end; however the final paragraph is so powerful, I’m compelled to quote it hear. Enjoy this great writing.
“The American Dream should require hard work, but it should not require 80-hour workweeks and parents who never see their kids from across the dinner table. The American Dream should entail a first-rate education for every child, but not an education that leaves no extra time for the actual enjoyment of childhood. The American Dream should accommodate the goal of home ownership, but without imposing a lifelong burden of unmeetable debt. Above all, the American Dream should be embraced as the unique sense of possibility that this country gives its citizens—the decent chance, as Moss Hart would say, to scale the walls and achieve what you wish.”
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Life. Culture. Education.
Life as Pop Culture Professor Clay Morgan
In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo he can take the blue pill and go on believing whatever he wants to believe. Or he can take the red pill to stay in Wonderland and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
This is a red pill type site that provides information in an entertaining way. It’s about clear thinking and good writing. It’s about finding meaning amidst the absurd. It’s about humor and truth.
I’m a writer / speaker who teaches history and political courses at a couple of local colleges. Where is local, you say? Well, that would be Wonderland of course.
On topics ranging from pop culture to the meaning of life, my brain’s always poppin’. Take the red pill and unplug.
