“That American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.”
In a 1931 book called “The Epic of America”, historian James Truslow Adams distilled the unalloyed faith in a better tomorrow that has been the calling card of the United States' 250 years as a nation.
It’s “strange to realise” that the term American Dream has a history, “since faith in upward mobility seems embedded in the American consciousness”, said Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. But, as the country prepares to celebrate Independence Day and its 250th birthday, the fragility of the American Dream has never been more apparent.
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A nation of immigrants, the US “has at its best treated the people flocking to its shores as a source of vitality and a validation of the American dream”, said The Economist.
But for some of its citizens “the new American dream” is now “to no longer live there”, said The Wall Street Journal’s Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. “Beneath the stormy optics” of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown “lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers”.
The American Dream “has always been a sell for immigrants”, said Asma Khalid on the BBC. “However, fewer of them are coming these days.”
Some of those who have succeeded in the US say it is getting tougher to do so. “It has brought me immense fulfilment through three successful businesses that provide me with freedom, income and happiness,” Carmen Barreto, a native of Venezuela who has lived in Florida for 15 years, told Agence France-Presse. “Many people hold on to the American dream, but given how tough things are getting, you can’t be the salmon swimming against the current – because you get tired, you burn out, it destroys you.”
An Associated Press-NORC poll last month found that only a third of Americans believe the American Dream still exists. A CNBC poll the same month found that a majority of people consider the American Dream out of reach.
But “most public polling captures what people believe about the accessibility of the American Dream for others”, said Gonzalo Schwarz, chief executive of the Archbridge Institute think tank, in The Washington Post. “In their own life, they are far more optimistic.” The problem comes from the media. “If people are constantly told that the country is irredeemable, that its obstacles are permanent and that hope is naive, they will eventually believe it.”
There has been a resurgence of optimism from a surprising source. In liberal circles, “faith in the American Dream is often dismissed as gauche and conservative”, said Hsu. But after Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayor’s race, the former Democratic National Committee co-vice-chair David Hogg said that the result was about “making the American Dream possible again”.
There is optimism too from “the country’s unabated dynamism”, said The Economist. And the corollary of that dynamism is “its capacity for reinvention”. As far back as the birth of the US, the American Dream was built on “the wisdom of the people. Time and again, that faith has been richly rewarded.”
What next?
The current generation of Americans might agree with Adams’ 1930s view that the dream was less about “motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order”. Paige Friscioni, a 38-year-old business owner from Detroit, told USA Today: “The American dream shouldn’t be something that’s designed by somebody else. It should be something that’s designed by you.
“The American dream isn’t that perfect thing anymore. The real American dream is to decide what you want to be.”
