The Myth of the "American Dream"

Most Americans - and likely most immigrants whether documented or not - believe in the so-called "American Dream" - the idea that through hard work anyone can rise to wealth and influence.  Increasingly, the reality is something quite different from Americas' ideas about upward social mobility (it's higher now in "Old Europe" than in America) and wealth inequality.  Indeed, most Americans would be shocked - or perhaps sickened - if they really focused on the reality of American society.  Yet the myth of the "American Dream" persists and allows plutocrats and their minions in elected office to continue the push to return America to a new Gilded Age that is wonderful for the wealthy, but frightening for most of us.  A piece in Salon looks at the reality and how the "American Dream" acts as an opiate for the masses.  Here are excerpts:

Multiple studies have shown that Americans seriously underestimate the degree of inequality in the U.S. economy. As Slate’s  Jordan Weissman noted in September, subjects in one test “estimated that the top 20 percent of U.S. households owned about 59 percent of the country’s net worth,” when in truth the number is closer to 84 percent. Moreover, the same study shows that even if the wealth of the U.S. economy was distributed like they’d believed, most Americans would still consider it too unequal. And these findings were consistent across many social groups; from Republicans to Democrats, from men to women, from the rich to the poor. No matter your vantage, it seems, Americans’ perception and their reality is not in sync.

[W]hile the gap between perception and reality was most pronounced in Americans, people from other developed (and increasingly unequal) economies also came up with ideal distributions that were markedly different from their countries’ actual status quo. What separates Americans from others, though — what makes inequality of this kind sustainable in the U.S. in a way that in other democracies isn’t; what makes the gap between perception and reality that Rock alluded to so difficult to bridge — is their faith in one of the greatest branding exercises in human history. I speak, of course, of the American Dream.

The American Dream isn’t new, of course, and it didn’t pop up as a response to the great divergence that started in the early 1970s. It’s been around for more than 100 years, and there really was a time, during the late 1800s, when rising wages and rags-to-riches stories made the theory at least plausible. But as the aforementioned U.C. Davis researcher Gregory Clark has found in a recent (paywalled) study, even if the American Dream was real in the past, it’s no longer operational today. “America has no higher rate of social mobility than medieval England or pre-industrial Sweden,”

Currently, the gap between perception and reality in U.S. society is papered over by the American Dream and its vow that regular people, through hard work and perseverance, will be able to get ahead. That dynamic won’t change until more Americans realize that the American Dream today is just an empty promise. But if that ever happens, the 1 percent and the stewards of government will have a whole lot more trouble on their hands than Chris Rock’s hypothetical riots.

Like religion, the "American Dream" is a great tool for keeping the masses docile and working for the powers that be and a system that is all too often rigged against most of us.  Of course, the 1% and their political whores like it that way.