The American Dream: Myth, Metaphor, and Reality

The Great Recession has awakened Americans to the reality that the American Dream has been under siege by governmental policies regarding taxes and financial deregulation. The metaphor “We Are the 99%,” the mantra of Occupy Wall Street, signifies a change in American attitudes about attainability of their expectations, hopes and aspirations.  “We Are the 99%,” symbolizes the generational downward mobility of Millennials and also represents an emerging worldview.  This worldview encompasses notions about extreme inequalities in income and opportunity in American society.  What is emerging is a sense that that the game is rigged.

This emerging worldview is significant because American democracy is an aspiration with indigenous meaning, practice and process; it is not a static system. This process, which is dynamic and ongoing, encapsulates the American Dream.  Belief in the American Dream is a central tenet of American culture and society and also is a part of the cultural compass that tells Americans who they are and how they should lead their lives.  For more than two centuries, equality of opportunity and upward mobility have formed the foundation of the American Dream; the American Dream remains at the core of America’s identity.  From an anthropological perspective, the American Dream functions to shape American society; it is a “myth” in the Malinowskian sense of a “charter for action,” or a retrospective moral pattern of behavior, or a charter conveying assumptions, values, and meaning about how to live.

Work as a category of analysis is central to analyzing the American Dream.  Carrie Lane, an anthropologist, believes that a job seeker’s view of how the world works is a myth, in the sense that it is made up, a symbolic way of conceptualizing society’s moral order and situating themselves in it.   The anthropologist Katherine Newman, author of Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class, characterized being laid off/downward mobility in moral terms as “falling from grace.”

What is true of a myth is also true of a metaphor: it is through language, as symbolic action, that people are able to size up and control, or at least cajole their natural, social, and supernatural environment (David Sapir).  The American Dream is also a metaphor.  It symbolizes a national ethos in which freedom includes the opportunity for spiritual fulfillment, material prosperity and success, and an upward mobility achieved through hard work and effort.  Katherine Dudley, my dissertation advisor, and author of The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Post-industrial America wrote that the American Dream is more than a statement about limitless opportunity, it is in her view about moral order.

One aspect of my research will examine the discourse Americans engage in about their expectations, hopes and aspirations.  Rather than ask informants questions about the American Dream, I will ask them the following questions: What kind of future do they expect? What are their expectations, hopes and aspirations?

The American Dream as a cultural icon exists in a “web of significance” (Clifford Geertz) or “an architecture of interpretation” (Katherine Newman).  The recent political economy has brought the paradox of the elements which constitute the American Dream into stark focus: working hard and doing the right things. These elements, which are embedded in the cultural conception of the American Dream, are currently not resulting in the payoffs that Americans historically expected. What does this mean long-term for the cultural compass that tells Americans who they are and how they should lead their lives?  What are the social and cultural consequences of Americans becoming untethered from the American Dream?

 

 

 

One thought on “The American Dream: Myth, Metaphor, and Reality

  1. Steve II

    If we assume the new paradigm for the American Dream is entrepreneurship, by definition is the inclination that fewer people we will be able to actually obtain the dream (majority of citizens are corp, gov’t, & small bus. employees). Is the obtainability of the dream being lessen by global competition or the disparity between the 1% and the 99%.

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