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American dream
The American Dream is the national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals including representative democracy, rights, liberty, and equality, in which freedom is interpreted as the opportunity for individual prosperity and success, as well as upward social mobility for oneself and their children, achieved through hard work in a capitalist society with few barriers.
The term “American Dream”
The term “American Dream” coine by James Truslow Adams in 1931, saying that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.[1]
Proponents of the American Dream often claim that its tenets originate from the United States Declaration of Independence, which states that “all men are created equal” with the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness“.[2] The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution is used similarly. It states that the Constitution’s purpose is to, in part, “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.[a]
Throughout American history, there have critics of its national ethos. Some critics point out that American focus on individualism and capital results in materialism, consumerism and a lack of worker solidarity.[3] In 2015, only 10.5 percent of American workers were members of a labor union.[4] The American Dream has also criticize as a product of American exceptionalism, as it does not acknowledge the hardships many Americans face, namely in regards to the legacies of American slavery and Native American genocide, as well as other examples of discriminatory violence.[5]
Belief in the American Dream often inversely associated with rates of national dissolutionment. Evidence indicates that upward economic mobility has declined and income inequality has risen in the United States in recent decades.[6] In 2020, a poll only 54 percent of US adults think the American Dream attainable for them, 28 percent believed it was unattainable for them personally, while 9 percent rejected the idea of the American Dream entirely. Younger generations were also less likely to believe in the American Dream than their older counterparts.[7]
History
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The meaning of the American Dream has changed over the course of history, and includes both personal components such as home ownership and upward mobility as well as a global vision for cultural hegemony and diplomacy.
18th century
Historically, the Dream originated in colonial mystique regarding frontier life. As John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the colonial Governor of Virginia, noted in 1774, the Americans “for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled”. He added that, “if they attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west”.[8]
19th century
Many well-educated Germans who fled the failed 1848 revolution find the United States more politically free than their homeland. Which they believed to be a hierarchical and aristocratic society that determined the ceiling for their aspirations. One of them claimed: