The American Dream is not just an aspiration. It is an immune system.
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The reason the American Dream is so specifically about individual wealth is not because Americans are unusually individualistic by nature.
It is because individual wealth as the supreme value is the one framework that cannot generate a class-conscious politics.
If the goal is my success, then the failure of others around me is not a systemic indictment.
It is competition.
It is proof that I worked harder.
It is, uncomfortably, evidence that I deserve my position.
But if the goal is collective flourishing, if the measure of a society is not its richest citizens but its most vulnerable ones, then suddenly the whole picture looks different.
Then the statistics about life expectancy and infant mortality and wage stagnation and inherited wealth are not background noise.
They are the verdict.
The American Dream is not just an aspiration.
It is an immune system.
It is specifically designed to prevent the kind of thinking that would make the people at the bottom organize together rather than compete against each other for the approval of the people at the top.
It works extraordinarily well.
It has worked for a hundred years.
And the people it works on most effectively are the people it hurts most.
posted by Satish Sharma at
03:26
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