Waking up From the American Dream

Defined by James Truslow Adams, the American Dream is of a “land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” The underlying principle of the Dream is that all Americans, regardless of race, creed, color, or religion, can achieve success in life by tapping into their potential and willingness to work hard. This definition of success is closely tied to the accumulation of material wealth and serves as a metaphor that works for the winners of the educational and vocational game but remains elusive for a constantly growing majority as the wealth gap expands. Over centuries, this worldview has been ingrained in American history, dating back to the very beginning of the New World. John Winthrop, a Puritan founder of New England, delivered his famous “Model of Christian Charity,” which serves as one of the clearest examples of the Dream’s impact and promise. As conveyed in his sermon, it was God’s will for there to be economic inequality, and God’s divine will alone would determine the success or failure of the colony; the people, however, could work to ensure success by trusting in the leadership of their authority figures.

However, the average 21st-century American may find this Dream ancient, irrelevant, or inaccurate. After all, Americans’ distrust of nearly every major social institution, including the federal government, corporate America, the media, and organized religion, continues to grow. At the same time, statistical trends indicate declining social mobility and individual success. Quantitatively, Chetty et al. confirm that absolute income mobility has fallen across all income brackets from 1940 to 1980, with the most significant declines in the middle class; in addition, the data highlights the predominant role of increased economic inequality in driving this decline, meaning both the gap and the inability to decrease the gap are growing. Additionally, the notion of America’s decline is widely propagated through social media, campaigns, and news segments, fostering a shared perspective evident in cross-party attacks, promises to “Make America Great Again,” and more. Despite these conditions, a surprising collective outlook remains: the American Dream.

So if the American Dream is not entirely motivated by the present political and economic conditions, why aren’t all Americans able to manipulate the rules of capitalism to work their way up? Why are Americans generally unconfident in their ability to live a better life than their parents? Why don’t the flaws within our social institutions provide a complete answer as to why such a majority is not achieving the American Dream? The response to this inquiry can manifest diversely, with no single factor providing a comprehensive understanding. One interpretation posits that the American Dream serves to uphold the existing order, a circumstance that, problematically, validates power disparities and impedes upward mobility. Instead of questioning the Dream, we as Americans are more likely to blame ourselves when the Dream is not achieved, which allows for maintained faith in the Dream irrespective of its actual achievability. The answer to why this is may be found through an unconventional approach shedding insights into the pervasive forces underestimated and ignored in American society.

Rags to Riches. Home of the Free. Land of Opportunity. America is the place where you can have it all. Wake up in your king-sized bed, kiss the kids and wife goodbye, put in a good day’s work, and come back to bed, just to do it all again tomorrow, until one day, you retire comfortably with all of yours happy, healthy, safe, and wealthy.

Viewing the American Dream as a comprehensive worldview allows for its evaluation under a Geertzian definition of religion and thus, a Marxist analysis of religion and alienation. Geertz defines religion as a system of symbols that establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in people by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. His definition revolves around the concepts of “worldview” and “ethos,” meaning a system of beliefs and symbols that gives significance to the experiences and existence of individuals within a particular cultural context, and the associated feelings with the worldview, respectively. To draw a connection between Geertz and the American Dream, the Dream uniquely falls under his definition seeing as the American Dream involves a set of beliefs and symbols related to individual success, upward mobility, and the pursuit of happiness, with an associated ethos contingent on hard work, individualism, and success.

In characterizing the Dream as a religion under Geertz’s definition, a Marxist critique of religion thus may be applied. Marx argues that human beings have always been motivated by basic needs of survival that can only be met through a mode of production, chaining overall success and survival to our economic mobility. In this context, a Marxist critique would undoubtedly be that the Dream acts as an opium of the people, providing illusionary relief from the real struggles of economic alienation. It justifies and upholds the status quo by giving grounds for how things are. Taking the example of stealing, to Marx, social institutions such as the state and religion protect the rich by not only imprisoning those who steal but also, more powerfully, by promoting ideas that stealing is wrong. Similarly, the internalized ideologies of the American Dream convince Americans that if they have not achieved the Dream, it is their fault, not the socioeconomic conditions that have been proven to limit their mobility. 

Across several studies, Chetty et al. find that income inequality is disconnected from the people’s demands of government. However, the results of Chetty et al. also demonstrate that the public is still responsive to changes in income inequality and social mobility. In this light, it appears that the electorate recognizes the increasing challenges of achieving the Dream but doesn’t associate this issue with the governmental structures exacerbating social divides. Instead, they fault inequality more with themselves. Thus, the faith in the American Dream persists, but in faulting themselves, the attainability of the Dream for each person becomes unlikely. The implications of this trend are twofold. On the positive side, Americans may be discovering motivation to exert heightened efforts and pursue success in suburban endeavors, even amidst challenges. This has the potential to cultivate an optimistic worldview and foster a corresponding ethos within American culture. However, the predominant impact of this trend is exacerbated inequality, resulting in a net negative for society.

America is supposedly a land with opportunity for each according to ability; however, for many groups, this opportunity is either nonexistent or consistently unequal. Americans with disabilities navigate cultural attitudes and values that often pathologize, disempower, and dehumanize their existence. By incorporating the American Dream into the collective societal worldview without ensuring inclusivity, we inadvertently contribute to the marginalization of individuals with disabilities, reinforcing barriers to their full participation and the realization of their aspirations. The same power differential exists in race relations, class relations, and all other categories that create divides in society, which leads to the worsening of preexisting divides and a never-ending cycle of polarization and division. Even as recently as the late 1900s, residential segregation, among many other kinds of segregation, made it significantly less feasible for African Americans and other minorities to receive the benefits of our “cooperative” scheme and confined many to the opposite of the American suburban Dream, where traditional hard work could never ensure success. It is the pervasive nature of the American Dream that helps the privileged maintain their higher position in the power differential and pushes minority groups into cycles of stagnancy. 

Does the American Dream inspire ambition or subtly mold us into complacency? Trapped in the American Dream, we perpetuate power differentials — breaking free may require reimagining the dream itself.

While this phenomenon is no small or individual factor in American society, there are still ways to combat its adverse effects moving forward. The first recommendation is working to increase the attainability of the American Dream for all through measures including technical education for middle- and low-income students that equip them for the increasingly high-tech, globalized economy; tax policy that avoids “bracket creep,” the results of which may include lower marginal tax rates and progressive taxation; the strengthening of labor unions; policy also supporting two-parent families (as opposed to the current policy mainly focusing resources solely on one-parent families); and other measures which promote broad-based economic growth, mobility, and equality. Many of these changes are much easier suggested than implemented, but reassuringly, they are more politically attainable than imagined. This is because the relative liberalism or conservatism of the public’s policy preferences does not seem to drive people’s belief in the American Dream as determined by Wolak and Peterson in “The Dynamic American Dream,” suggesting that the American Dream is instead a shared, nonpartisan system of belief. Therefore, formulating policies based on our shared ideology enhances the likelihood that new policies will steer clear of the pitfalls of polarization. Concerning the implications towards people with disabilities and that industrial capitalism initially established the still prevalent conditions in which people with impairments were unable to meet the demands of wage labor, Clifton, in his 2020 report “Hierarchies of power” calls on all Americans to “confront the compulsory able-bodied normative culture, unmasking the narrow assumptions that create and sustain power, control, and exclusion.” This may be accomplished in part by advocating for the social model of disability, which switches the focus of disability policy from individual impairments to the transformation of social systems, thereby acknowledging that health and well-being are socially determined and combating complacency to the status quo. Manifestation of this shift takes forms that transform material conditions by creating more accessible accommodation, education, employment, and social services. The spirit of the American Dream can and will endure amid the realities we face, but it is our responsibility to utilize this collective ethos to dismantle the power differentials and restructure America as a “land of opportunity” for all. 

Maya Santhanam ‘27 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at m.j.santhanam@wustl.edu.