The American Dream after COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought widespread changes to the United States and around the world at record speed, from tragic illnesses and deaths to the quirkiness of social distancing and binge-watching online shows.

After years of low unemployment, the initial economic fallout from the virus increased jobless claims in the United States by 3,000% in about a month. Now many American workers and their families cannot reap the fruits of the American Dream.

^{Cartoon depicting the state of the restaurant industry by Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News, NY (published with permission).}

In fact, cracks in the sterling promises of the American Dream had already been showing up in recent history. Millennials have come of age hearing they are the first generation in American history who will not do as well as their parents.

That equation of the American Dream with wealth, however, misses a deeper sense of what the phrase has meant. It has always been about more than just acquisition of material goods.

Enter the COVID pandemic, which provides us an opportunity to rethink the American Dream and to reclaim the depths of democratic opportunities embedded in it.

The American Dream in American History

The phrase itself was coined in 1931 by historian James Truslow Adams. Adams expressed confidence, even at the outset of the Great Depression, that the traditional American social dynamics for improving one’s station in life applied to “any and every class.”

^{Historian James Truslow Adams who coined the term "The American Dream" (left). Requiem for the American Dream: Unemployed men at the White Angel Breadline in San Francisco, California 1933 (right).}

Adams’ compelling phrase summarized his portrait of America. He believed that in this land, without the confining impediments of traditional hierarchies, the poor could rise in station based on their own abilities and hard work.

Adams did not acknowledge that these opportunities mostly went to white Protestants, with the hard work and the losses of non-whites and non-Protestants contributing to the opportunities of the privileged. Displaced Natives and enslaved African Americans lived with the cruelest opposite of the American Dream. Their abilities brought sneers and their hard work rarely won them rewards.

The American Dream has sometimes been supported by withholding opportunities from some people, by immigration restriction or prejudice, to ensure fulfillment of the dream only for the privileged. In 1964 Malcolm X told a crowd: “I don’t see any American Dream; I see an American nightmare.”

^{Uncle Sam kicks out Chinese immigrants, referring both to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and also to the "Magic Washer." The actual purpose of the poster was to promote the "George Dee Magic Washer," which the machine's manufacturers clearly hoped would displace Chinese laundry operators, 1886.}

That biting commentary shows how deeply the phrase had rooted in the American imagination, which Malcolm targeted for critique. It had become a popular way to describe social mobility, and it has implied confidence that social contexts here could be readily overcome, abilities and efforts were readily rewarded, and problems were only exceptions.

In the United States, dreams would be self-made. And because American society has presented few material or cultural checks on ambition, those dreams could sometimes soar to enormous heights, even without any connection to hard work. One celebrity quoted by James Fallows brashly stated that “being paid more than you’re worth is the American Dream.”

Virus, First Contact

COVID and its economic fallout operated by different principles. Even workers not subject to prejudice, playing by the rules of the American Dream, are finding their ambitions less and less attainable.

With attention first focused on the spread of the disease, a tacit expectation also spread that this was just a peculiar exception to normal times. But as Frank Snowden suggests, this virus may linger and strike in waves as did the 1918 Spanish Flu and the even more deadly medieval Black Death. These diseases, including our current plague, are, after all, only natural—in part.

^{A protest sign from the Climate Change Camp in 2007 at Heathrow Airport in London. The Anthropocene Era has brought about these 'cries of the world.'}

Environmentalists call recent times the Anthropocene Era, when the human species has wrought enormous impacts on planet earth with climate change and loss of species. But these changes have been accompanied by remarkable cultural and social achievements.

We do live in the Anthropocene, but these times are also a smaller chapter of what could be called the Microcene, a much longer era of earth dominance by microscopic viruses and bacteria. Compared to the successes of the human primate, these creatures are more adaptable, and as William McNeill recounts, they have significant control over human history.

And human development has actually enhanced the strength of viruses and unhealthy bacteria, effectively creating a veritable Microcene Dream for microbes with limited opportunities.

Countless microbes had long remained confined to local settings, but as human habitations have spread, greater contact with wildlife has provided these pathogens with opportunities to migrate out of their old locales. The resulting increased zoonoses, diseases transmittable from animals to humans, make full use of modern human practices.

^{Examples of Zoonotic diseases and their affected populations.}

Globalization provides highways of transmission, and cities, crowded markets, and refugee camps increase potentials for contagion. The diseases are natural, even as human practices amplify their spread and virulence, providing what Ted Steinberg calls the “unnatural” components of natural disasters.

Vulnerabilities Exposed

This pandemic, Farhad Manjoo points out, has alerted Americans that “our society might be far more brittle than we had once imagined.”

Other colossal problems lurk, ranging from skyrocketing healthcare costs, eroding infrastructure, nuclear war, and terrorist strikes to rising sea levels, decimation of fisheries, reduced arable land, toxins leaching into waterways, and other human-made and natural disasters.

Any one of these could disrupt the American Dream even more deeply. The strangest aspect of these strange times may be that it has taken so long for one of these massive disruptions to erupt on a national scale.

^{A poster from 1942 made by The Sheldon-Claire Company to promote the U.S .Government's version of The American Dream during World War II.}

The grim possibilities highlight that the American Dream and its success stories have been skating on assumptions of a generally healthy, undisrupted, and peaceful society. Americans have faced disasters before: epidemics, hurricanes, earthquakes, depressions, and wars. Most of them have been localized, temporary, managed, or offshore, as with almost every American war.

This history has encouraged a sense that such problems are exceptions to the regular smooth operations of society, not factors to consider seriously compared with the abundance of opportunities. Even the tens of millions of deaths worldwide from the 1918-19 Spanish Flu, a largely forgotten pandemic, did not dent this powerful American self-understanding.

For hundreds of years, looking beyond disasters has been the norm for American majorities. Americans weathered the setbacks while the dream endured because better opportunities always seemed just around the next corner.

Historically, expansion has been a prime way to overcome limits on opportunities.

^{Caricature of American expansionism and racism showing Uncle Sam lecturing four children labelled Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Cuba in front of children holding books labelled with various U.S. states. In the background are a Native American child holding a book upside down, a Chinese boy at the door, and an African American boy cleaning a window. Originally published in the January 25, 1899 issue of Puck magazine.}

Initially, that expansion was geographic with growth across North America to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and more territories. The expansion has also been economic, with growth in markets enabling industrious citizens to rise in station. And expanding rights have allowed more nonwhite citizens their own paths of opportunity.

Throughout, the key to the American Dream has been growth, with each generation expecting more of it. Fixation on growth has been hard-wired into our national policies and personal expectations.

Presidential administrations are measured by their ability to generate economic growth while bigger houses and larger flat screens measure our personal success. Mainstream economists can’t conceive of economies that don’t grow. No wonder Americans rarely question this design feature of our national self-perception.

^{During the signing ceremony of S. 811, The American Dream Downpayment Act, President George W. Bush delivers remarks at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C., 2003. Home Ownership is often cited as the hallmark of the American Dream but can also cause economic downfall when lending practices become inflated.}

The dream of personal advancement has inhibited the response to the COVID-19 outbreak, which calls for Americans to rise to public challenges.

Hospitals, pushed to produce profits, find themselves without enough equipment as front-line workers sacrifice for the common good. Businesses focused on efficiency and profits are hard-pressed to adapt to urgent changes. The entire system built to achieve growth is short on resilience.

Bipartisan Endorsements of the American Dream

The American Dream with its assumptions of constant growth has enabled the United States to be simultaneously conservative and liberal.

There is conservatism in the incentives for enterprising economic ventures, with impulses for low taxes and reduced regulation; there is liberalism in legal support of rights for more citizens, often expressed with material uplift. These views, with accompanying ideological debates over a host of domestic and foreign policy issues, are generally assumed to exist in sharp contrast.

In fact, polarization is the dominant political storyline of our time. Yet these flares of fighting surge around a deep consensus about the American Dream.

^{President Donald J. Trump at a rally in 2017. His remarks included the hope that American workers, families and dreams would come first again.}

Each ideological position aims to defeat the other side. But unless the nation can find ways to revise dreams about material abundance with support of other rewarding parts of the American dream, proponents of each ideological position will suffer. So too will the whole United States, with conservatives seeking to squeeze more riches from our resources and liberals gamely striving to ensure that more can share in those riches.

Rarely have we had serious discussions about the limits to material gains or, more generously, about how that growth might be shared more equitably. Bipartisan criticism accompanies any portrait of a society that includes less striving for more and more. Conservatives taunt that without growth, enterprisers will be punished. Meanwhile, liberals rely on growth to bring more citizens into the prosperity tent. Both outlooks assume life without major disasters.

^{President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan visit a classroom at the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) in Brooklyn, N.Y., 2013.}

American education has served as a great bipartisan equalizer. However, as Victor Tan Chen points out about recent attempts by wealthy and celebrity parents to gain advantages for their children in college admission, “opportunities to acquire talents and skills [have] become lopsided.”

Recent economic and cultural trends have actually shaken the promises of the American Dream.

Looking Squarely at the American Dream, Side Effects and All

The American Dream, with its assumptions about resources readily available for human enterprises, has shown little reckoning with the environmental impact of those human dreams.

^{A stop sign in Southeastern Ohio spray-painted in opposition to constant strip mining and depletion of natural resources, 1973.}

In fact, this traditional way of using resources displays what American philosopher and psychologist William James called a “wishing-cap” approach to life. He referred to the “apps” available in the early 20^th century: “We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone.”