the american dream

As stated here previously, one of my favorite authors is Peggy Noonan. She’s witty and wise, articulate and animated. I’ve watched her on multiple networks, from ABC and NBC to MSNBC and FOX News. While conservative in nature, she is fair-minded. This week she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

In an election season when the individual emotions of many journalists seemed far more vocal than any presentation of news or balanced perspective, Noonan was a consistent, fair, thought-provoking editorialist. The prize judges said Noonan rose “to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.”

Ah, those shared virtues… so many seem to have forgotten…

Last week, Noonan had yet another great column, attempting to again connect us. She wrestled with “What’s Become of the American Dream?”

She started by saying that the dream is not dead, but “it needs strengthening.” She defines it as “the belief, held by generation after generation since our beginning and reanimated over the decades by waves of immigrants, that here you can start from anywhere and become anything.”

She then gives some tremendous examples… Abraham Lincoln, the one time “backwoods nobody”… Barbara Stanwyck, who lost her parents… and Jonas Salk, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. One became President, another a “magnetic actress,” and another cured polio. But then Noonan makes an important distinction…

“… The American dream was about aspiration and the possibility that, with dedication and focus, it could be fulfilled. But the American dream was not about material things—houses, cars, a guarantee of future increase. That’s the construction we put on it now. It’s wrong. A big house could be the product of the dream, if that’s what you wanted, but the house itself was not the dream. You could, acting on your vision of the dream, read, learn, hold a modest job and rent a home, but at town council meetings you could stand, lead with wisdom and knowledge, and become a figure of local respect. Maybe the respect was your dream. Stanwyck became rich, Salk revered. Both realized the dream.”

Somehow we got the dream mixed up. Part of that, Noonan opines, is that when Grandpa shared that “this is the American dream,” the kids looked around, saw the houses and car, and assumed the American dream is “things.” But it is not; “material things could be, and often were, its fruits.” Noonan poignantly continues…

“… The American dream was never fully realized, not by a long shot, and we all know this. The original sin of America, slavery, meant some of the oldest Americans were brutally excluded from it. The dream is best understood as a continuing project requiring constant repair and expansion, with an eye to removing barriers and roadblocks for all.

Many reasons are put forward in the argument over whether the American Dream is over (no) or ailing (yes) or was always divisive (no—dreams keep nations together). We see income inequality, as the wealthy prosper while the middle class grinds away and the working class slips away. There is a widening distance, literally, between the rich and the poor. Once the richest man in town lived nearby, on the nicest street on the right side of the tracks. Now he’s decamped to a loft in SoHo. ‘The big sort’ has become sociocultural apartheid. It’s globalization, it’s the decline in the power of private-sector unions and the brakes they applied.

What ails the dream is a worthy debate. I’d include this: The dream requires adults who can launch kids sturdily into Dream-land.

When kids have one or two parents who are functioning, reliable, affectionate—who will stand in line for the charter-school lottery, who will fill out the forms, who will see that the football uniform gets washed and is folded on the stairs in the morning—there’s a good chance they’ll be OK. If you come from that now, it’s like being born on third base and being able to hit a triple. You’ll be able to pursue the dream.

But I see kids who don’t have that person, who are from families or arrangements that didn’t cohere, who have no one to stand in line for them or get them up in the morning. What I see more and more in America is damaged or absent parents. We all know what’s said in this part—drugs, family breakup. Poor parenting is not a new story in human history, and has never been new in America. But insufficient parents used to be able to tell their kids to go out, go play in America, go play in its culture. And the old aspirational culture, the one of the American dream, could counter a lot. Now we have stressed kids operating within a nihilistic popular culture that can harm them. So these kids have nothing—not the example of a functioning family and not the comfort of a culture into which they can safely escape.

This is not a failure of policy but a failure of love. And it’s hard to change national policy on a problem like that.”

[Insightful commentary… thought-provoking once again…]

Respectfully…
AR