Thoughts on the American Dream and Its Future

In approaching a topic as slippery as the “American Dream,” let alone its future, I will borrow from the famous turn-of-thecentury German Sociologist Georg Simmel’s discussion of the relativity of reality. Reality, he said, is a function of distance. If you walk through a forest, for example, the trees are real but the forest is not (because you can see each tree but not the entire forest), but from the air, the forest is real but the individual trees are not. As the American pragmatists would have said, reality is a matter of perspective. And so it is with the American Dream. It is real, to be sure. It was born of European conceptions of progress, the Enlightenment’s creation of the concept of the individual, and political philosophy’s articulation of individual rights. Those ideas together provided a set of operating rationales for the American Revolution, which, once in place, contributed to an incredible American optimism about our political system that Thomas Jefferson called the world’s “best hope” and Abraham Lincoln regarded as the “last, best hope of earth.” But, while it is real, it is also permeated by contradiction, conflations of myth and fiction, and self-interested symbolism—all of which provide an image of the future and a distorted, nostalgic version of the past that nonetheless rests at the heart of our culture and simultaneously gives us peace of mind and drives us mad. The American Dream, in a word, is