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Where Has The American Dream Gone? [1]

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Date: 2023-11-27

When Martin Luther King delivered his stirring speech, “I Have a Dream”, he called not for new American values but that America live up to its ideals. He spoke about cashing a check, claiming a promise of extending the high ideals of America to all Americans. In many ways, it is an optimistic speech, filled with hope for the future. Decades later, that sense that America is a land filled with promise has evaporated. Americans are at their most pessimistic about their future in decades. We expect that the future will be worse than the present, that living standards will fall, that America’s influence is waning, that fewer and fewer Americans will be able to buy a new home, that inequality will be greater, that, above all, we are headed toward catastrophe. America the beautiful has entered its middle age, a period of crisis and pessimism and self-questioning. We are living at the end of the American Dream. Where did it go wrong?

The New Deal

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of our greatest presidents, and from a governance point of view, perhaps the greatest. His New Deal emerged after the Great Depression, as a way of reorganizing society so that individuals would have greater protections from economic shocks,a nd so that people would have more support in their pursuit of the American Dream. Roosevelt had three aims when launching the New Deal, what historians call the 3Rs: relief for the unemployed, recovery of the economy, and reform of the financial system to prevent another depression. The success of the program gave the Democratic Party what seemed to be a permanent majority, holding the White House in seven out of nine presidential terms between 193 and 1969. The New Deal marked the Democratic Party as a progressive movement that defended unions, worked to uplift minorities, and fought for the poor. These progressive ideals were not unique to America: France under Charles de Gaulle launched a similar series of reforms that led to what the French call, “the thirty glorious years”. That model largely remains in France, and indeed is there in many parts of Europe, including Scandinavia. It is no coincidence that, by all measures, Europeans enjoy higher living standards than America. That was unthinkable decades ago, when America had the world’s greatest economy, an economy where nobody on earth enjoyed better living standards than Americans.

Dismantling the Greatest Economy

Since the 1970s, the greatest economy humanity has ever seen, has steadily been dismantled. AMerica remains the world’s richest country, but it is no longer an economy made for people, it is an economy built for the rich. Today, America is more unequal than it was during the Gilded Age. The Allantic argues that this happened because voters turned against this model. For example, under President Ronald Reagan, the power of unions was definitively ended. Even though the UAW has won huge concessions, they will still earn less than they did decades ago. Reagan was the man who seemed possessed by an obsession to dismantle the legacy of the New Deal, and, again, he was not alone among leaders. In the United Kingdom, prime minister Margaret Thatcher was taking an ax to the welfare state. Decades later, both countries are more unequal than ever, and facing plunging living standards.

Where the New Deal proposed a society in which solidarity between the classes was paramount, the dismantling of the New Deal legacy has been all about making the rich richer. Tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, fighting unions, increasing executive compensation, and weakening antitrust laws, has led to the America we see today. We no longer live in a society of all for all, but, we live in a society where everyone is left to the wolves and only the rich thrive.

Part of the reason that Americans moved away from this successful model seems to be that many white Americans felt that, as black Americans entered the workforce, they were unwilling to see their tax dollars used to support black people, whom they deemed undeserving. It is not a coincidence that Republicans embraced anti-welfare policies, something that was not so true when FDR was president and he could appeal to Republican progressives. Today, the idea of a “Republican progressive” seems laughable. The Atlantic points out that with the march of civil rights, fewer and fewer white Americans believed that the government should guarantee jobs for all. In 1956, 65% of Americans believed this, in 1964, 35% did. Today, the job guarantee is a minority Democratic position. It is time we returned to the principles of the greatest economy, and created an American economy of all for all, one that is anxious to help the poor and the working class, and racial minorities. Without that, America will never recover.

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