What a grift. It only exists to make folks feel worthless, angry, and divisive. As such, it’s the perfect tactic to sow national unrest.
James Truslow Adams coined the phrase in 1931, at the nadir of the Great Depression:
“The American Dream is a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
When you’re sitting in a 1931 financial shithole in which only the rich are getting richer and the poor are dying off, this sounds pretty romantic. Romantic hides the truth. The phrase was untrue then, it’s untrue now, and only gets used to put forth some baseball, hot dog, and apple pie version of White, rural, evangelical America that only a comparatively few people live in (10-12%). And even there, the wholesome Christian folks don’t necessarily thrive, what with Monsanto destroying their crops and such.
They were promised something that doesn’t exist.
“The American Dream” is advertising bunkum. Much of its fervor was meant to keep people in this country from leaving, offering unfounded hope where there was no hope. Better to starve here than to go somewhere else and give them cheap labor.
Black people could never be a part of the American Dream. Fittingly, many Black people look at the phrase in disgust, with the possible exception the few that made money or gained power on the backs of other Black people, like Clarence “Pubic Hair on the Coke Can” Thomas.
The phrase has never applied to poor people of any color living in this country. Why should the wealthiest social Darwinists allow those people to gain power by achieving something based on romantic twaddle? They don’t want others to have any power. To them, the world is comprised of a hundred billionaire divas and 8 billion nonunion extras to dominate.
Why is the “American Dream” a dangerous myth? According to Ruth Whippman of Time, the American Dream has caused material wealth to be the single most important metric of success in America. Those who have it are kings. Those who don’t are failures.
“At its best, the American Dream can be both moving and inspiring, but it is also problematic, not least because it is largely false. Research shows that in reality, American social mobility is among the lowest in the developed world. Far from being the Land of Opportunity, a child born poor in America is more likely to remain poor than in any other comparable country….
“…The subtle insistence that we should somehow all be striving for greatness can be surprisingly psychologically corrosive. One of the defining measures of happiness is the size of the gap between our expectations and our reality. The American Dream has become the mass production of unrealistic expectations. The constant thrum of the ‘you can be anything you want to be’ mantra has created a low level sense of inadequacy and anxiety in American life, where anything short of greatness can start to feel like failure.”
As Rutger Bregman once said, “Poverty isn’t a lack of character; it’s a lack of cash.” Cynically damning people into false hope for all time based on their ability to get money regardless of their caste level is the goal of those who worship at the altar of Our Brothers of Those Born on Third Base. Their accepted-by-all interpretation of American Dream that promotes rural or suburban wealth, picket fences, and all the White Anglo Saxon Protestantism you can stomach.
We treat people who are out of work, unhoused, and non-White as failures, not as people dealing with a corrupt system that leaves them nothing but hope to hold onto. This brand of failure-shaming is corrosive to the health of any country, causing unnecessary stress, anxiety, and pain to people already feeling stress, anxiety, and pain.
There are enough obstacles to life when you are poor. It’s worse when the American Dream merchants insinuate that you a failure as a human being because you’re poor.
What would happen if there were no more spouting about the “American Dream?”
After all, other countries don’t have a concept of a national dream. Many countries — including many in the Middle East — have religious-based dreams filled with just as many lies and fairy tales as any other. But there’s no Liechtensteiner Traum, Rêve Haïtien, or Eesti Unistus. If you used those phrase in Liechtenstein, Haiti, or Estonia, respectively, you’d get a puzzled look, at best. In England, they’d probably pour you a cup of tea and complain about the royal family.
For many of you, it might be considered sacrilege to defrock the American Dream, even in 2026 when everyone’s awake. Sadly, right-wing radical conservatives won’t have read this far (probably bailing at the phrase “Pubic Hair on the Coke Can”), so I’m probably just preaching to the choir. Who knows, maybe you haven’t read this far either, although, let’s be honest, you obviously have.
If the phrase and its top-down stressors were jettisoned out of jingoistic existence, the following might be true as well, synthesizing ideas from the flourishing social democracies of Scandinavia and the thoughts of Thomas Piketty, Robert Putnam, and others:
- The country would define success as ensuring that scarcity is rare, rather than the upwardly-mobile escape from scarcity;
- Universal baselines would exist in healthcare, education, housing stability, and digital access;
- Wealth security would still promote business startups because the failure scenario would be less costly to the entrepreneur — ambition would still exist, but it would be decoupled from survival anxiety;
- Success would be measured not by building individual wealth, but by building national achievements in child poverty rates, median wealth growth, and life expectancy, the latter of which would rise from its record-low levels;
- Less stress and anxiety on all levels of the citizenry; and with less stress comes higher tolerance, less hatred and bigotry, less tribalism, more open diversity, and great minds coming from all of the country, regardless of age, creed, color, gender, orientation, and every other kind of diversity — including White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
In this admittedly utopian view of a DSA without the poisonous toxicity of the “American Dream,” the country would no longer promise transcendence through struggle, but happiness through design. It would not be about chasing something hopeless with only arrows of hope in the quiver, it would be about maintaining a high, nationwide standard that would stand as the natural social equivalent of “and justice for all.”
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