Guest post: The dream has curdled
Originally a comment by Rob on He channels their diffuse anger.
For years, decades really, the American Dream has been dead. For people born in America anyway. But politicians, pundits, and commentators have banged on about it regardless – I suspect mostly because if they admit that the Dream is over they would have to construct some other meaningful framework to hold this vast and disparate society together. As the Dream dies, so does the concept of American exceptionalism. Sure, America is still exceptional, but it is no longer singularly so. It is no longer the top dog in every field of endeavour and is unlikely to be so again. Arguably it never was, and where it was, that was often because of its willingness to embrace the talents of immigrants. To accept them as Americans contributing to the exceptional whole of the polity.
When was the last American generation that really benefited from the Dream? The 50’s, with the boom of well paid manufacturing and professional jobs? The 60’s with the Civil Rights movement and Americas assent to being the dominant world power and all that ensured? It certainly hasn’t been any generation since. Sure, there’s still opportunities, but individual success doesn’t equate to a National Dream. One person winning an obscene lottery every couple of years cannot be a unifying American Dream. Can it?
Instead we’re left with a significant portion of the population suffering from intergenerational disappointment and being unable or unwilling to comprehend the reasons for their disappointment. How their own consumer, social, and political choices contributed to the death of the Dream. Those people have become afraid of the future, afraid of the new, afraid of the energy of immigrants. They phone for mythical golden eras, but lack the will and knowledge to rebuild them. The Dream has curdled, and this diffuse anger will not age well.
Thank you Ophelia, I think we’ll put that down to drugs (I’d just had my morning caffeine).
If we’re being charitable, we can look at the The American Dream as a symbol of the moral system that America embodied for two centuries: a dignity culture: “opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”
Sociologists have argued that societies tend to develop from honour cultures to dignity cultures to victimhood cultures as the role of government grows.
The US started out with little centralized, organized authority to keep the peace. Conflicts had to be resolved personally, so blood feuds and duels became commonplace, and honour was the moral currency of the time.
At the turn of the 19th Century following the establishment of the U.S. Constitution, the government started to become stable enough to maintain law and order, and people began to derive moral worth from demonstrating resilience and personal achievement.
That moral paradigm shift was best exemplified when Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in order to restore his moral standing following a personal insult. The outcry that ensued showed that the honour culture Burr adhered to had been replaced by the dignity culture espoused by Hamilton. In the new moral paradigm, Burr’s act was viewed as deplorable, not respectable.
It looks like we’re in the midst of the next moral paradigm shift, to a victimhood culture. They emerge as it becomes clear that, while a moral emphasis on personal achievement does keep the peace, it does not eliminate unequal outcomes for all citizens, so appeals to authority are increasingly made to correct perceived injustices. Both the left and the right in the US appear to have taken on that mindset.
They tend to spiral out of control and bring about powerful, totalitarian states. In victim cultures, high moral worth derives from allegiance to a powerful authority (a governing body, or a collective mob) which is held up as the sole means to correct the perceived injustice that permeates the world and prevents everyone sharing in equal amounts of dignity.
Many of the countless communist revolutions across the world in the 20th Century quickly descended into bloody and brutal totalitarian regimes. Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, etc, etc.
Here in North America, whether we go MAGA or woke: both sides are hell bent on tearing down the checks and balances that keep the system from breaking down.
The moral balance between personal responsibility and appeal to authority, which the US has kept running for 200 years, is rapidly collapsing.
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