“[P]erhaps Paul’s sudden elevation from schoolmaster to millionaire struck a still vibrant chord of optimism in each of them, so that they said to themselves over their ledgers and typewriters: ‘it may be me next time.’”

Evelyn Waugh
Decline and Fall (1928)

merican society’s greatest sleight of hand, the persistent belief that it is classless, suffers periodic cataclysms. Sometimes, as in the dislocated images of Katrina-chased black refugees begging for water or clambering onto buses, they are impossible to ignore. Other times, the media conspires to make them almost invisible—if more telling. Scant weeks before the hurricane devastation that preoccupied the national airspace, an event took place of the sort that only makes its way onto National Public Radio or the back pages of the New York Times. At its fiftieth annual meeting, the afl-cio—the country’s largest labour body, a conjunction of two mighty umbrella unions gathering a dozen others—split in two. Led by Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern, a significant portion of the afl-cio’s body, including Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers, and unite here, decided to head out on their own.

The wedge issue The final divide Lobbying versus organizing. The defectors still believed in actual union drives and what Stern did not hesitate to call the “American dream” for workers—not just one lobby group among countless others crowding the concourses of the Capitol, but a force for social justice. These are the same people who brought you the eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, and the weekend. The moment was pregnant with futility as well as nobility. Organized labour in the United States now represents between 8 and 12 percent of the total workforce, a sharp decline from the over 30 percent who were unionized during Big Labor’s heyday. With soft union-busting tactics of the Wal-Mart variety—excluding labour reps from stores, straw-polling underpaid workers with fear-soaked questions—now the norm, the prospect of greater organization is dim. Offshore labour is too cheap, Chinese imports too numerous, and domestic politics too distracted by religious hooey like “intelligent design.” The idea of a general strike or a food riot or a violent May Day demonstration is these days unimaginable, even laughable—an image from another world altogether.

Of course, the idea of American citizens drowning and starving to death while their government dithered about how to help them was likewise unimaginable—until it happened.

Stern’s invocation of the American dream is a useful reminder of the instability that lies at the centre of the United States. A tension persists between two versions of the dream, a difference frequently elided for reasons both innocent and sly. One dream—the older one, as it happens—is about a society that takes justice seriously and offers a structure of mobility, what John Locke called “the career open to talents,” combined with care or compensation for the least well-off. The other dream is a vision of acquisition pure and simple, though often romanticized in ways belonging to an American television comedy of the 1950s, where the median income of depicted households was, in today’s dollars, less than a third of what is seen in television’s current ten most popular shows. Even idealization is subject to the laws of inflation, apparently, and dreams get priced out of their own market when material success overpowers all other values. At that point, they are naturally subject to the massive debt-financing characteristic of the current domestic economy. After all, the idea that one might have to wait to realize the dream is unthinkable. The dream is, in a familiar paradox of human desire, both demanded immediately and deferred constantly.

The two dreams are in fact contradictory, but substituting the latter for the former—making the enjoyment of material goods a governing virtue of American life along the way—has, in effect, created a third, hybrid American dream: the hallucination that a country where poverty is more widespread by the year, and where the gap between rich and poor is growing with the aid of tax cuts and low-cost inheritance, is actually both wealthy and just. Between 1979 and 2003, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent of American households rose 129 percent, to more than $700,000 (all figures US); the income of the middle fifth enjoyed just a 15-percent lift, to $44,800; and the income of the poorest fifth struggled with a 4-percent rise. Despite its vast gdp, poverty is growing in America, not declining: the United States Census Bureau reported last year that 12.7 percent of the population lived in poverty in 2004, up from 12.5 percent in 2003. The US now ranks twenty-fourth among industrialized nations in income disparity; only Mexico and Russia rank lower.

Everybody’s getting richer, after a fashion, but the super-rich are pulling ahead even as the majority fall behind. This can be hard to see: sleek durables, leisure activities, and cheap credit are easy to come by. This is comfort without reflection on comfort’s conditions of possibility: the diminishing marginal urgency of leisure goods generates a diminishing marginal urgency of the questions leisure is supposed to allow.

he quintessential expression of the American dream today can be heard in almost any sports broadcast, courtesy of Ameriquest Mortgage Company, one of the country’s largest home-financing concerns, which has a massive advertising budget, including a small fleet of blimps deployed at sporting events. The company took out a service mark on this slogan: “Proud Sponsor of the American Dream.” For those who, like me, had not heard the phrase “service mark” before, it is defined by Webster’s as “any word, name, symbol, device, or any combination, used, or intended to be used, in commerce, to identify and distinguish the services of one provider from services provided by others, and to indicate the source of the services.” Not only is the American dream brought to you by Ameriquest Mortgage, in other words, but nobody is doing it quite like them.

The idea of an American dream is so firmly planted in the loam of national consciousness as to appear chthonic, primeval, originary—a natural property of the whole democratic experiment. But like most ideologies, the dream is a construct with human, not divine, provenance. Nobody can claim utter certainty when it comes to the proverbial, indeed mythic, language of a nation; nevertheless, most historians credit popular chronicler James Truslow Adams with coining the phrase “American dream” in his 1931 volume of dewy optimism, The Epic of America. Adams was no apologist for the current arrangements. The American vision, he wrote, is:

that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Do you hear that, dear friends and neighbours Not motor cars. High wages No, not them either. For that matter, the passage does not even mention the houses, Chevrolets, and white picket fences that feature so centrally in homespun versions of the dream circa the post-war boom—the rhapsodic appreciation of the breezeway and the bungalow so deftly skewered by Don DeLillo in Underworld. No such things of any kind. Richer life, yes, but in the sense of fuller; a dream of order and self-actualization. Indeed, by today’s protracted ideological standards, where US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is considered a moderate, Adams’ rhetoric is nothing short of hard-left looniness, socialism in all but name. And yet, the position is here espoused not merely as viable in America but as the essence of the American project. Indeed, his talk of “opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” must help explain that enduring irony of American high-school students consistently attributing quotations from The Communist Manifesto to the Declaration of Independence. From each according to his ability!

But before Adams there was Alger. For popular dissemination of the dream’s siren call nothing can match the dozens of dime novels penned by Horatio Alger, Jr. Alger’s tales of bootstrapping youngsters clearing hurdle after hurdle to go from applecart-pusher to tycoon had already burrowed deep into the American psyche—often against Golden Age evidence to the contrary. Even that great social engineer Plato could not have desired a more able propagandist of social class than someone who sustains the illusion of mobility, especially if mobility is keyed to ability. “If a child born to a worker or a farmer has a nature tinged with gold or silver,” Socrates tells his nodding companions in The Republic, “they shall honour it and elevate it to the rank of either guardian or auxiliary.” Which sounds nice, until you recall that the entire gold, silver, and brass business is an example of that lie we choose to call noble, a myth intended to keep everyone in their proper places.

Just to be sure this strange tale of innate caste takes hold, Socrates suggests eliminating all the adults in his hypothetical city before deploying the myth of the metals. But he should have been more confident in its genius. Every tyrant knows that a whiff of possibility provides more effective security from revolt than any amount of force. Next time, it could be me! Or my son. “Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream,” the New York Times noted in a 2005 feature package on class in America, even as it reported that economic evidence suggests upward change in social position is limited, and may be declining.

More than half of families earning less than $30,000 a year claim that they have achieved the dream, or soon will. Forty-five percent of respondents said they were in a higher class as adults than when they were growing up. Perhaps indicating the lengths to which citizens will go to make this true, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that Americans’ total 2005 spending outstripped earnings by $33.9 billion—the first year spending exceeded earnings since 1933. The will to believe is stronger than ever, in short, even while access to the dream gets mortgaged inside and remains limited outside. Economic mobility in the United States is actually lower than in Canada or Scandinavia, and no higher than in France or Britain. And yet nobody says much about the Norwegian dream or French equality of opportunity—maybe because nobody feels the need to.