The Decline and Fall of the American Dream

Martin Luther King had a dream. The country's Founding Fathers apparently had one too, an ideal to be aspired to, the Great American Democratic Experiment. Their dream was to create a country based on principles, not race, ethnicity and tribalism, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".  

Yet in the two hundred and forty five years since the Declaration of Independence was signed, that dream has proved elusive.  Granted the country as created enormous economic wealth in aggregate yet it remains remarkably unequal, not just in outcomes, which is to be expected, but in opportunity which should not be.

With the new millennium, a generation has begun pushing more forcefully to realize that dream, and to grapple with the sins of the past that still cast a long shadow, sometime real, sometimes imagined. With it has come a shift in culture towards compassion and collectivism and away from the rugged individualism that once was central to so many Americans' sense of identity.  

David Brooks, writing about his visit to the National Conservatism Conference, sees the right as turning to the state as the only tool left to ward off the woke evil corporate behemoths, the indoctrinating mind-control of higher education and the cultural censorship of the so called main-stream media. Some of what Brooks fears is already happening.  Conservative legislatures are gerrymandering electoral districts to their advantage, and putting partisan electoral officials in place of supposedly neutral ones. They are banning books from schools and dictating curriculum.  That may stem the tide for a while. 

But suppose the "NatCons", if (or rather when) they get the levers of power, they go further. Trump has already set the stage for a more authoritarian approach to governing. If the illiberal regimes he so admires (Turkey, Hungary, Belarus) are the template for the NatCons' philosophy, censorship and increasing curtailing of speech and thought deemed inconsistent with the national interest (i.e., their philosophy) may come next. 

Ultimately, that may not only mark the end of the American Dream as a set of aspirational principles, it may also cripple the American Dream's economic component. International trade with Europe could suffer, universities will attract fewer top-notch faculty from abroad, entrepreneurs may find other more attractive places to work. And when innovation and trade suffer, the economy follows, and as it does, the immigration needed to make up for a declining birthrate will decline. Assuming that the country does not implode in something approaching civil war, America will sink into a slow fading-away, no longer seen as the beacon of freedom it once was.  So the the GOP, I humbly suggest, "be careful what you wish for".