The Reinterpretation of the American Dream
September 30, 2025
Rifling through an old file cabinet, I come upon an exam I took three decades ago. “Perhaps the most thorough form of American studies scholarship would be to psychoanalyze each American,” I wrote. “Trace which myths and symbols have intersected his or her experience; how much of their content has become conscious; how their psyche has modified these myths and symbols; how subcultures, political and economic circumstances and personal relationships have intensified or interfered.
“Insurance would never cover it,” I added, trying to be droll.
Now, none of that is funny. In grad school, you can make sweeping suggestions and think no further. In a country that has lost its collective mind, thinking is urgent. I sit back on my haunches, file drawer open, trying to remember all those myths and symbols I once studied. The myth of America as the new Eden, the promised land, with opportunity for all. A classless society full of Horatio Algers, up by their bootstraps. The American dream. Brave revolutionaries defending freedom at all costs. Rugged individualism and vigilante justice. A wide open frontier, there to be claimed. Manifest destiny. A nation free of religious persecution and tyranny. A city on a hill, beacon of hope and moral guidance. American exceptionalism, because we are somehow different, nobler, with a special mission the world must accept. A country willing to embrace the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. A land of vast open spaces and natural abundance. Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.”
So many beautiful ideas. So many unfulfilled dreams. So many lies and distortions.
America is like the Bible: we each pick the passages that resonate and ignore the rest. Then we are shocked by the responses of those who picked different passages. Those who take justice into their own hands, because that defines their manhood. Those who feel entitled to kick out anyone who makes them uncomfortable. Those who mock, shame, or cancel anyone who does not hold their values. Those who storm the capitol to insist on a coup.
It is all there in our collective DNA. A thirst for freedom that never quite meant freedom for all.
If you still believe we are a classless society, and anybody in a housing project can work hard and become a billionaire, then you will worry a lot less about education, opportunity, and safety nets. If you still believe the White European settlers were superior, more civilized, than the people already living here—or the Africans enslaved for profit—then inclusiveness and reparations will seem absurd. If you believe this is, for all its ostensible diversity, a Christian country with a moral responsibility to uphold conservative Christian values, you will not champion women’s control over their own bodies or anyone’s right to love outside your Christian boundaries.
But what about that Garden of Eden abundance? It should relax us, make us generous. Live and let live. There is enough to go around. This is the Land of Plenty, after all.
That, I think, was the first domino to fall.
As soon as we started to hear about limits, about the need to drive less and turn the air-conditioning higher and recycle, people tightened up. How could abundant resources run out? How could an economy predicated upon growth begin to contract? If this was in fact a land of scarcity, they had to find ways to hold on to what they had, not give any of it away. The U.S. was already, as a culture, acquisitive and competitive and individualistic. Now it was every person for themselves, focused on their own needs and desires. Trust broke. And the social fabric ripped to shreds.
Okay, this is a vast oversimplification. There are many other variables, many crucial details. But as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson point out in Abundance, all those conveyor belts zapping us every consumer good we could possibly want “distracted us from a scarcity of homes and energy and infrastructure and scientific breakthroughs.” The consequence? We now have “a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.”
The rich have grown far richer, the poor have struggled even harder, and the middle class that stabilized society has been squeezed and rolled like toothpaste. “Between 1999 and 2023, the average premium for employer-based family health insurance rose from $5,791 to $23,968—an increase of more than 300 percent—and the worker contribution to that premium more than quadrupled,” Abundance reports. The same thing happened with housing costs. And though I like to blame the searing scorn of higher ed on anti-intellectualism and a resentment of excess wokism, the average annual cost of tuition and fees at public colleges went from $394 to $11,310 in that same time frame, and the average cost at private colleges from $1,706 to $41,740.
Well, sure, but in twenty-four years, you would expect dramatic rises, right? Yes—but you also expect salaries to increase. Which did not happen proportionally. Cold water was splashed on private American dreams. And when the future falls away, or terrifies, the past is the only safe retreat. Thus nostalgia has taken on dangerous power, with people seeming eager to drag women and minorities back to subordinate roles.
Again, an oversimplification. Myths and symbols do that. But the basic human point is that it is easier to be kind, to be trusting, to be altruistic, if what you need to live is in abundant supply.
Because this country was a group project, individual consciousness was linked to social consciousness in a way older civilizations had lost. To be an American meant something entirely new. We the people were creating a nation, embarking upon a grand experiment in which citizens from all over the world, of all creeds and colors, could collaborate in self-governance. At least, that was how I defined it. Others dreamed of a different, more homogeneous and heroic success.
But however you interpreted the American dream, it was all that held us together. It found form in written documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—and the majestic bald eagle, and a star-spangled banner that still waved at dawn. People have since burned that flag, sold it on cheap souvenirs, emblazoned it on their asses. That majestic bird also happens to be a raptor. And the highest court of the land is playing fast and loose with the Constitution.
President Trump’s letter to new U.S. citizens emphasizes assimilation and the sacred bond they have just forged “with our Nation, her traditions, her history, her culture, and her values.” This is quite a shift, Atlantic writer David Graham points out, from past presidents’ letters. Biden called the U.S. “a nation of immigrants” and told the new citizens that they had become part of an idea. George W. Bush spoke of “grand and enduring ideals.” Bill Clinton wrote, “You now share in a great experiment: a nation dedicated to the ideal that all of us are created equal, a nation with profound respect for individual rights.”
Trump’s letter is not a quirk of personality. It reflects the larger shift that carried him to office.
The affluence that grew after World War II made various civil-rights movements possible. Relaxed, we turned our attention to identity and values. Pushes for social justice have been coming in waves ever since. But we forgot to shore up collective identity while we worked on fixing past abuses. And so, along the old cultural fault lines, drawn by contradictory interpretations of what this country stands for, our society has cracked into pieces.
Culturally, at least. But now add economics and its tagalong, politics. In The Age of Austerity, journalist and academic Thomas Byrne Edsall wrote that since the 2008 Great Recession (that terrible blow to our optimism!) the two political parties had been “enmeshed in a death struggle to protect the benefits and goods that flow to their respective bases.” He also noted that “conditions of scarcity work to the advantage of conservatives, undermining the willingness of voters to sacrifice—pay higher taxes—for the less fortunate.” The bold revolutionaries and frontier adventurers had turned risk-averse. Republican leaders were galvanized, because they saw “the window closing on the opportunity to dismantle the liberal state.”
They have prevailed. And the myths and symbols of a still-young country are being infused with their interpretation.
