Obituary: The American Dream (1931–2025)
Obituary: The American Dream (1931–2025)
By Theodore Russell Jordan
For Cassingle Collective Dispatch
The American Dream, a once-robust ideal that defined a century of global aspiration, passed away this week. It was 94. The cause of death was cited as a prolonged battle with systemic inequality, stagnant wages, and the prohibitive cost of existing.
Born in 1931 during the depths of the Great Depression, the Dream was the brainchild of historian James Truslow Adams. He delivered it in his book The Epic of America. Adams described it as a vision 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 was a modest birth for such a heavy burden.
In its youth, the Dream was a creature of the post-war boom. It spent its formative years in the 1950s and 1960s wandering through Levittown suburbs and attending college on the GI Bill. It was a time of unprecedented growth. During this period, the Dream was characterized by a white picket fence, a stable forty-hour work week, and the revolutionary idea that a single income could support a family of four and a retirement. It promised that each generation would inevitably surpass the one that came before.
The Dream reached its peak of influence during the mid-twentieth century. It became the primary export of the United States. It was sold in thirty-minute sitcom blocks and glossy magazine spreads. It was the "shining city on a hill" that beckoned to those across the oceans. It represented the belief that merit was the only currency that mattered.
The first signs of decline appeared in the late 1970s. The Dream began to suffer from a series of economic strokes known as deindustrialization. The steady manufacturing jobs that once served as its heartbeat were outsourced. The gap between productivity and pay began to widen. By the 1980s, the Dream was placed on a restrictive diet of "trickle-down" economics. It never quite recovered its original vigor.
The new millennium was particularly unkind. The 2008 housing crisis acted as a massive trauma to the skeletal structure of the Dream. The very homes that were supposed to be its foundation became its anchors.
In its final years, the Dream was kept on life support by a cocktail of predatory student loans and soaring healthcare costs. It struggled against a gig economy that traded security for the illusion of flexibility. It spent its last days scrolling through social media, watching a small percentage of the population hoard the resources it once promised to the masses.
The Dream is survived by its estranged cousin, the American Hustle; its cynical child, the Side Quest; and millions of inheritors who possess the ambition of their ancestors but none of the infrastructure. Among these survivors are the creators and builders who, like those at Cassingle Collective, attempt to construct ethical alternatives while caught in the jaws of the rent trap. For many, upward mobility has shifted from a staircase to a treadmill. The effort required just to stay in place is now greater than the effort once required to ascend.
Funeral services will be held at various foreclosure auctions and shuttered community centers across the country. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you consider supporting independent publishing collectives that still believe in the dignity of creators.
The American Dream will be buried in a potter's field behind a luxury condo development. It leaves behind a massive void in the national psyche. It will be remembered as a beautiful, if often exclusive, promise that simply could not survive the weight of its own contradictions.