From Hollywood to Home: Black Voices in Entertainment
- The American Dream endures as a flexible national ideal, commodified and branded, including malls, meme coins, and corporate initiatives.
- Rising inequality and shrinking mobility reduced chances to out-earn parents; Chetty and Barbara Ehrenreich describe growing anxiety and fear of falling.
- Public faith has waned; Pew Research Center finds declining trust, and Gen Z now prioritizes stability and debt-free lives over riches.
- The Dream mixes collective mythology with private pressure; interviews like Studs Terkel's and Stephen Cruz show success feels like risk, not certainty.
The American Dream has always had its skeptics, and not just among those who have been institutionally marginalized. Rags-to-riches stories are often described as “Gatsbyesque,” a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby.” Some people forget that Fitzgerald took a dim view of the extremes to which a young striver might go in the name of reinvention. Perhaps this was the underside of what Adams’s Frenchman described: an insatiable appetite for more, coupled with a lingering paranoia that your place within this social order would never be securely fixed. When anything is possible, can anything be enough?
In the nineteen-sixties, for example, some questioned whether material possessions alone could make you feel as though you’d arrived. As a 1967 New York Times op-ed put it, middle-class people had now begun to “dream hip,” craving a kind of authenticity that money could not buy. (Around the same time, another Times writer observed that rising levels of anxiety and insomnia had led some to believe that the “American dream today is to sleep.”) As a character in Edward Albee’s scathing 1961 play “The American Dream” laments, “That’s the way things are today; you just can’t get satisfaction; you just try.”
Perhaps the problem arose from the extravagant expectations of American life, the sense that bad luck will always be chased by good fortune and that the poor man is merely someone who has yet to strike it rich. The American Dream is at once a story of unyielding, collective progress and something we experience individually. Success is relative, and failure is easily internalized as our fault alone. However free we are to pursue our potential, we can struggle to accept that our potential might take us no further.
By the late nineteen-seventies, as the manufacturing economy declined and wealth became increasingly concentrated in the financial sector, traditional pathways to middle-class prosperity began to narrow. Chetty, the economist, observed that the likelihood of outearning one’s parents gradually fell from ninety-two per cent among those born in 1940 to about fifty per cent among those born forty years later. In the nineteen-eighties, Barbara Ehrenreich described the “fear of falling” at the heart of American middle-class life—the anxieties bred by a hypercompetitive society in which people fretted about their individual status at the expense of class-based politics. The historian Studs Terkel encountered a similar skittishness while conducting interviews for his 1980 book, “American Dreams.” One interviewee, a Mexican American businessman named Stephen Cruz who had immigrated with his family as a child, explained that the American Dream amounted to little more than “power and fear.” Even though the Cruzes were a classic immigrant success story, he felt that it simply meant he had more to lose: “The dream is not losing.” By the nineties, George Carlin would crack, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
For all that, the American Dream remains, a century after “The Epic of America,” the intoxicating idea on which our national identity rests, capacious enough to rationalize every form of ambition, from the modest to the megalomaniacal. It describes the scholarship student who is the first in the family to attend college as well as the billionaire touting a self-made empire. It remains, too, a durable brand: the American Dream is the name of a racehorse, a mall in New Jersey, the world’s longest limousine, a family-run nut-butter company in Indiana, a meme coin currently trading at $0.00002, and an initiative recently launched by JPMorgan Chase to help small businesses.
Whether we still wholeheartedly believe in it is another question. The phrase has become a convenient shorthand for pollsters and pundits seeking a vibes-based understanding of our views on the future. In 2024, the Pew Research Center reported that forty-seven per cent of Americans no longer trusted the American Dream’s promise of success through “hard work and determination.” Those who still held these beliefs skewed older and more conservative. (As recently as 2011, a similar Pew survey had shown that sixty-three per cent still felt that they could get ahead if they applied themselves.) This year, a Wells Fargo poll suggested that most parents with children between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight have to provide substantial financial support for them. Studies indicate that Gen Z’s hope is for a kind of bare-bones stability, for a debt-free life rather than one filled with riches.
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