Fantasy Politics

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/magazine/07FOB-WWLN-t.html

Fantasy Politics
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

Throughout his recent run for Senate, the Florida Republican Marco
Rubio made a big deal of the sacrifices his Cuban immigrant family
made “so that I could live the American dream.” By campaign’s end, he
was using the phrase so regularly that spokesmen for his Democratic
opponent, Congressman Kendrick B. Meek, were reminding reporters that
Rubio did not have a patent on it. The American dream mattered a lot
in this election. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative activist
group, laid out plans for repealing President Obama’s health care
reform and fighting environmental regulation at its Defending the
American Dream Summit two months ago. The president, meanwhile, closed
this fall’s campaign with an exhortation to “restore the American
dream for not just some, but for every, every, everybody in this great
land.” If both sides agree that the dream is imperiled, and that
recovering it is a top national priority, then it may be this
“dream”of ours is not a unifying idea but a vague slogan, no more to
be trusted than any other piece of campaign rhetoric.

When the popular historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the
American dream” in “The Epic of America” (1931), it was as a kind of
lazy-minded leitmotif. Sometimes it meant the frontier spirit,
sometimes Jeffersonian democracy and sometimes just the hope that
Americans could “grow to fullest development as men and women,
unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older
civilizations.” As a chronicler of common people, Adams had a
peculiarity: he was a snob. He was dazzled by the material and
cultural riches of aristocratic societies and bemoaned their lack in
America. The American dream, he implied, is what we got as a
consolation prize. It could find its expression in plebeian
anti-intellectualism and an unjustified sense of entitlement. It was
never, Adams admitted, “a logical concept of thought.”

But it was a concept of such power that Americans have imposed their
own logic on it ever since. Franklin Roosevelt, a decade after Adams’s
book, enunciated his Four Freedoms — freedom of speech and worship,
freedom from want and fear — which Norman Rockwell turned into a
series of paintings that embodied the idea. There were skeptics and
debunkers, too. In Edward Albee’s play “The American Dream” (1960),
parents mutilate and kill their adopted son. Norman Mailer’s novel
“The American Dream” (1965) is about a guy who murders his wife.

A lot of elements make up the American dream — pride, equality,
autonomy, upward mobility, a just reward for effort and so on. As
American culture got more pluralistic in the last half century, the
American dream developed minority strands. Anyone who started a
commune in Vermont was living a version of it, however dissident or
ironic. But during the great de-ironization that began around the time
of Ronald Reagan’s election, one element of the American dream came to
predominate: homeownership.

If the American dream has appeared endangered since the housing bubble
brought the financial system to the brink of ruin, that is with good
reason. The American dream is the ideology of the housing bubble. Karl
E. Case, co-creator of the Case-Shiller home-price index, wrote
recently of the rude awakening faced by those who “think the American
dream is owning property that appreciates by 30 percent a year.” Some
of the most destructive government programs traveled under that
banner: in 2003, President Bush launched an American Dream Downpayment
Initiative to provide federally subsidized booster payments for
“deserving families who have bad credit histories.” His housing
secretary, Mel Martinez, promoted minority homeownership by outfitting
a bus called the American Dream Express.

Many Americans who got caught up in the housing bubble grew entitled
and complacent, as Adams warned they might, and overborrowed. But a
feckless government also deserves the blame for pushing more credit on
citizens than they could withstand — perhaps to counterbalance the
rise of income inequality to dangerous levels. So argues the Chicago
finance professor Raghuram G. Rajan in his convincing recent book,
“Fault Lines.” You can draw a variety of political conclusions from
the mess we’re in: either the public hasn’t been worthy of the
American dream, or the government has been peddling a counterfeit of
it.

Perhaps because they were making so much money out of it, Americans
were slow to notice something peculiar about the American dream, and
potentially divisive. The ideal of living “unhampered,” as Adams put
it, by the barriers to social mobility erected in other countries is
meaningful most of all to those familiar with other countries. The
American dream is more evident to elites (including well-traveled
historians like Adams) and to immigrants than it is to others. It is
cosmopolitanism masquerading as American exceptionalism. When the
billionaire Peter Peterson announced this year that he would join an
initiative launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and use at least
half his wealth for philanthropy, he referred to himself as “the son
of poor Greek immigrants who has certainly lived the American dream.”
Paradoxically, it is Peterson’s Greekness rather than his Americanness
that gives him the bona fides to pronounce on the subject.

Optimism in the face of hardship is, of course, one of the glories of
America’s immigrant history. A 75-minute bus commute to a job at
Wal-Mart, which looks like wage-slavery to the son of a unionized
industrial worker, might be a dream come true for an immigrant from a
poor country, or even for that immigrant’s son. So it should not
surprise us that polling results released by Xavier University last
winter showed new immigrants to be among the biggest believers in the
American dream. But it ought to worry us more than it does that
middle-aged Midwestern white women, according to Xavier, are among the
most skeptical about it. Confronted with the economy we are now living
through, such people are unlikely to be comforted by assurances that
their circumstances beat those of mid-20th-century Greece.

Most of the time we do not realize that what we are dreaming is the
American dream, any more than we realize that what we are speaking is
prose. World travelers, politicians and self-made men are not wrong to
see the promise of American life as a stirring and romantic tale. To
the median, native-born American with no other frame of reference but
his life’s span in this country, however, it is not a dream. It is
simply the social contract. We are increasingly discovering that there
are rational, nononeiric ways to measure when that contract is being
broken.

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