We can’t pretend things are going great in the US. But we also must reject the pessimism that says things must stay like this I love the United Sta

The American dream is dead for many. Social democracy can bring it back

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2024-09-16 18:30:03

We can’t pretend things are going great in the US. But we also must reject the pessimism that says things must stay like this

I love the United States. My parents came here from Trinidad and Tobago the year before I was born, and they and my four siblings eventually became citizens. My parents struggled for many years to get established here, but it has offered us everything – security, belonging, opportunity.

Yet for many Americans, particularly those who have been in this country for generations building the foundations of American prosperity, the American dream is not alive and well.

This point can’t be debated with measures of the United States’ relative affluence; it’s what American workers are telling us, both through how they respond to polls directly on the question and through the political views they increasingly hold. The question isn’t if the American dream is dead, it’s how we go about reviving it.

By the time the writer James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase “American dream” in the 1930s, it had already existed as an ethos for generations. Despite the country’s brutality towards Black and Native people, there is a reason why masses of workers saw the United States as a place without the leftovers of feudalism and aristocratic privilege holding people back. Even Karl Marx himself looked to the world’s “most progressive nation” to lead a “new era of ascendancy” for the working classes after the triumph of Union forces in the civil war.