The American Dream has become an American Nightmare
Most of the following quotes are from Wikipedia's piece on the American Dream. Some are edited slightly for succinctness.
The "American Dream" is a phrase referring to a purported national ethos of the United States: that every person has the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life. The phrase was popularized during the Great Depression and has had different meanings over time. Originally, the emphasis was on democracy, liberty, and equality, but more recently has been on achieving material wealth and upward social mobility.
Someone did something very right when framing the ideals of this country though evidence suggests they stole those ideas from Native Americans and then pursued a policy of genocide against the very people that inspired them to seek a better social order than they had as colonies of a British empire.
The Haudenosaunee Confederation is described as a still living democracy and the Wikipedia article documents that some historians suggest the founding fathers of the US borrowed ideas from it. I actually think that makes more sense than the standard narrative that these were unique incredible idealistic geniuses who just birthed a new concept of government whole cloth.
I am extremely pro library and have spent a lot of time in libraries in my life, starting in childhood when I spent hours in the children's section while my mother helped my older sister work on the high school newspaper. I'm appalled by the current administration's anti library and anti education policies and I'm thrilled to see this section in the Wikipedia article about the American Dream:
...the American institution that best exemplified the American dream was the Library of Congress; he contrasted it with European libraries of the time, which restricted access to many of their works, and argued that the Library, as an institution funded by and meant to uphold democracy, was an example of democratic government's ability to uplift and equalize the people that it ruled over and was ruled by in order to "save itself" from a takeover by oligarchic forces. The Library also offered an opportunity for the whole nation to come together in thoughtful pursuit of a common good.
I'm also quite happy to see this section on the Civil Rights movement:
Martin Luther King Jr., in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963), rooted the civil rights movement in the African-American quest for the American Dream.
I've long written about issues like homelessness and struggled to find a conceptual framework for talking about rights, political power, education and similar as essential to self determination and upward mobility. That framework already exists. It's called the American dream but, unfortunately, our dreams have died and were replaced by an American nightmare:
Evidence indicates that in recent decades social mobility in the United States has declined, and income inequality has risen. Social mobility is lower in the US than in many European countries, especially the Nordic countries.
I'm pro education, pro transportation diversity, pro LGBTQ rights, anti racist and looking for solutions to our current debacle rooted in car culture and the suffocating development patterns fostered by car culture and the fact that our housing industry is a prisoner of the Ghost of Christmas Past in the form of being strongly shaped by the birth of the 'burbs and never really updated appropriately in the decades since.
It's been roughly 75 or even 80 years since we created the policies that created the modern suburb which people loved and adored because carpeting the US with small starter homes solved a nationwide housing crisis. We've lost sight of the fact that the suburbs were wonderful because they gave housing to so many ordinary Americans and our idea of the American Dream housing-wise has become a bastardized concept of those 1950s homes on steroids with a two-car garage, twice the square footage and fewer household members.
I have generally understood the American Dream to be:
1. Home ownership.
2. A serious career that adequately supports a family even if you aren't college educated.
3. Upward mobility and an expectation that your life would be better than your parents and your children's lives would be better than yours.
Historically, one option for a serious career was small business and that seems to largely be a thing of the past. Our founding fathers believed that we needed most Americans to be small business owners as a foundation for democracy because if too many people are employees, too many people are someone's bitch and not truly free to speak their minds and vote their conscience.