So Long, American Dream, It was Good to Know You
George Carlin once cleverly noted, “That’s why they call it the American Dream- because you have to be asleep to believe it.” By the time he said that, it was a bleak but mostly true observation. But from the end of World War II, until the early 2000s, the American Dream was at least possible for most people to achieve.
I came from a lower middle-class family. No one graduated from college, and a few didn’t finish high school. I was born with bold fantasies, but little practical ambition. Clearly, I could have made a lot more money than I did. But I still managed to luck into a lovely version of the American Dream; loyal wife, a wonderful son and daughter, and a nice sized single family home in a very quiet neighborhood. And, of course, after I hit fifty, the sudden and unexpected fruition of my wildest dreams of becoming a published author. Ten books later, I realize just how fortunate I’ve been. I did little to deserve all the blessings I have. I’m sure I consistently fall short of being grateful enough for it all. But I can’t stop thinking of all those who didn’t have my luck. Who didn’t achieve the American Dream in any way, shape, or form. Now, things have deteriorated to such an extent that very few can hope to achieve it.
The American dream, as popularly expressed by politicians and media during the 1940s-1950s, meant owning your own home. Preferably with that white picket fence. A garden to tend to. A yard to mow, with no illegals around yet to do it. A faithful wife, who loved to cook for you, and didn’t mind housework. Who wanted as many children as you did. The larger the family the better. This Dream was much easier to achieve in the immediate postwar era. The girls would line up to marry you if you had served in the “good war.” It was kind of like being a doctor. And your job prospects were brighter as well, especially if you had won a medal or two. Every company liked to hire veterans. They were still everywhere you looked when I entered the workforce in the mid-1970s. Every one of those old timers I talked to had clearly experienced the American Dream. I don’t think I met any without a wife, kids, and a nice home.
So I understand the bitterness that many Millennials and Gen Zers feel toward the Boomers. We- especially the Boomers who are a decade or so older than me- were definitely the Luckiest Generation. We could pay for much more reasonable college tuition by working at a fast food place. Well, not me- as I’ve related far too many times, I was a community college dropout. Just about every job paid a living wage after World War II, up until maybe the early 1980s. Upward mobility was more possible than it ever had been before. It’s obviously very rare now. Unions were strong, and triggered higher wages, nicer benefits, and decent pensions. Even at non- union workplaces which wanted to be competitive. I knew a guy who was a cashier at Safeway in the early ‘80s. He was making $17 an hour, which translates to about $112,000 in today’s money. That same job at the same company pays less than $17 an hour to start. Today. Food prices in the ‘80s were much lower. Make that make sense.
Retired Boomers think the workplace is still the same as when they were seeking a job in the 1970s. Then, you really could walk into a place and be hired on the spot. Now, you have to apply online, take pointless tests, and compete often with hundreds of other applicants. For starting pay that won’t be enough for you live independently anywhere in this country. They think fast food jobs are for teenagers. Which they used to be. They seem oblivious to the impact from decades of outsourcing, disastrous trade deals, massive immigration and foreign visa workers. This is not your World War II veteran’s America any more. Trump’s accurate analysis of our trade policies attracted many to him. Tariffs are needed, but in typical Trump fashion, he’s doing things backward; domestic industry must be restored first, so there is some competition for foreign imports. I don’t see any new factories being built.
The destruction of the American Dream is reflected everywhere around us. The crumbling infrastructure, crying out for attention like a starving Palestinian. The rise in obesity, chronic illness, and slovenliness. “Smart” phones, which have helped to destroy eye to eye communication. Dwindling marriage rates and plummeting birth rates, especially for young Whites. Every poll shows that a clear majority of young girls have no interest in becoming mothers. This is a pure recipe for extinction. Dysfunctional families are the norm now. We have a loneliness phenomenon, which I wrote about and have pinned at the top of my Substack page. You can’t live the American Dream alone. It’s not the American Dream without a spouse and children, and a nice house in the suburbs, with or without a picket fence. I desperately want my children to experience an even better version of the American Dream than I have. But being realistic, I fear that just may not be possible.
None of this happened naturally. We didn’t “evolve” to a point where females no longer want to be feminine, and males have turned into submissive soy boys. Males didn’t lose their levels of testosterone because of nonsense like “Climate Change.” Females didn’t abruptly lose the maternal instinct because they became enlightened. Our odious culture was responsible for all of it. Beginning in the 1950s, when teenagers were conditioned to hate their parents for no reason, as represented in films like Rebel Without a Cause, and the best-selling book Catcher in the Rye, and television shows went from promoting unrealistic but socially desirable family harmony, to flooding the airwaves with single mothers, and fractured families where the children disrespected the parents, and the father figure went from Ward Cleaver to Al Bundy. Men were depicted as weak idiots. Housework and motherhood were discouraged. Cats and dogs were portrayed as apt replacements for that nagging maternal instinct.
As I detailed in my book Bullyocracy, there is evidence that teenagers were “invented” in the 1950s, as a hot new demographic to exploit. All those great films from the ‘50s directly targeted them; I was a Teenage Werewolf, Teenagers From Outer Space, etc. And the films increasingly portrayed a friction between parents and their pubescent children that doesn’t seem to have existed before. Somehow, I can’t picture teenage angst on the prairie. Do we really think Colonial era teenagers rolled their eyes at their parents, and screeched, “You just don’t understand me!” Family farms were the norm in this country for a very long time. They couldn’t have been productive with that kind of nonsensical bickering between parents and kids. Virtually all young people had the same goal; to meet the boy or girl of their dreams, get married and fruitfully multiply, and live happily ever after. Now a young woman gets cats and immerses herself in work. Young men satisfy themselves with video games and porn.
It wouldn’t have been possible to destroy the family unit, which is the foundation of the American Dream, without focusing on the fairer sex. Until the 1960s, men had little chance of being a “player,” and bedding different women. Females were raised to be “good girls,” and most of them were. Some slipped up a bit, but a “shotgun wedding” quickly ensued, and the American Dream could still be accomplished. Men aren’t naturally monogamous. Women were. That’s been altered through conditioning. By itself, feminism changed the landscape. In one fell swoop, women learned they didn’t need to be chained to their kitchens, and young girls discovered that you didn’t have to wait for marriage to have sex. This seemed a great victory for the young men of that era, but it opened the door to no fault divorces, latch key kids, and widespread abortions. Sex without deep feelings results in sex with dire consequences. By the 1980s, few brides and grooms were sexual strangers before their honeymoons.
The counterculture was antiwar. Well, at least the Vietnam War. Which was a good thing. But the hippies were also anti-nuclear family. Their American Dream was far different from the traditional one. More than a half century later, the American Dream has turned into a real nightmare for most people. Employees aren’t being paid enough, if they can even get a job, to pay rent on a small apartment, let alone buy a starter home. Middle-aged and older workers have been the victims of unspoken discrimination, and experienced layoffs and outsourcing. Many who formerly made a nice salary have been relegated to jobs like grocery store cashiers. Which now doesn’t pay enough to live independently. In the 1980s, the same job paid enough to qualify you to purchase a nice home. Reagan’s clash with the Air Traffic Controllers was the first blow to the power of unions. Big Labor is dead as a political force now. No Democrat courts them, as they once did the powerful George Meanys of the world.
The conservative response to the death of the American Dream is to deny that it’s dead. Because, of course, it isn’t dead for anyone in the fortunate top twenty percent of the population. This is the new managerial class, the ones who run the mess. They’ll call you snowflake, and advise you to become an entrepreneur. 90 percent of small businesses fold within a year or something, but conservatives act like it’s easy to start your own business in America 2.0. If over 70 percent of the public can’t save $500, how are they going to handle the startup costs? And we can’t all be small business owners. Someone has to do the grunt work. Both parties love to wax rhapsodic over “small business,” when they permitted untold numbers of small business owners to be decimated by the senseless COVID shutdown. In reality, both sides love cheap labor. Low wages, no benefits, and illegal immigrants, baby!
Financially, the American Dream was killed by an unprecedented consolidation of wealth, in the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs. You can’t have a First World economy, let alone an American Dream, when the bottom half of your population has less than one percent of the total wealth collectively. Even if we started manufacturing things again, you’d have to pay those 150 million or more Americans much higher wages, if you want them to buy your new products. The billionaires have their gated, palatial estates. An increasing number of Americans are living in tents on the streets, where they now also freely defecate. And no one hurries to clean it up. Somehow, I don’t think that was ever intended to be a part of the American Dream. And it’s all happening in full view of tyrannical masters who watch our every move on security cameras. But aren’t proactive in the least about this glaring disparity of wealth.
Decades ago, it could be fairly said that if you found yourself homeless, it was because you didn’t want to work. That certainly isn’t the case now. Most polls claim that at least 10 percent of the homeless work, most of them full time. One of the best things Bernie Sanders ever said was that no one should be homeless when they’re working full time. The cost of housing, the cost of food, the cost of transportation, all contribute to this. Many blue collar workers have to Uber, thereby losing perhaps half their daily pay to transportation, because of the increased cost of automobiles. At jobs that don’t pay enough to live on your own to begin with. Another mainstream answer is to push the new minimalist nonsense, where young people can enjoy living in tiny boxes. That may be the Chinese reality, but it’s surely not the American Dream. As I’ve said many times- put the preschoolers in charge, and they’d do a much better job.
Life imitates art. When your role models are immoral, your society becomes immoral, too. Outside of the very flawed modern Christian churches, every organ in the culture pushes materialism and living for the moment. No one is presenting big families in a positive way. Look at the reception the reality show 19 Kids and Counting received from all the best and brightest critics. The only marriage that is looked upon favorably is gay marriage. The transgender explosion ensures that there will be even less procreation in the future. Less babies seems to be the focal point of the propaganda. I don’t mean to denigrate married couples who were unfortunately unable to have children; they may have felt they achieved the American Dream without them. But most people used to include marriage, and multiple children, in that individual American Dream. With young people not wanting children now, it becomes obsolete.
There are many things that killed the American Dream. Executive greed and consolidation of wealth, which resulted in stagnant wages for most. You can’t have much of an American Dream when over 70 percent of your workers are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have $500 in savings. Both Democrats and Republicans were complicit, by approving the outsourcing of our industry, and refusing to address the slew of problems created by this rigged economy. I am happy I was able to live the American Dream. My generation may be the last where most people enjoyed that. A peaceful neighborhood and steadily increasing home equity are beautiful assets. Having children and grandchildren there to treasure in old age, and to care for you when you become infirm, are incomparable blessings. I am seething with anger over the fact that this has been stolen from my descendants.