"The American dream" increasingly seen as cynical historical fiction.

[kpete]

Crumbling American Dreams
By ROBERT D. PUTNAM



My hometown — Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,050 — was in the 1950s a passable embodiment of the American dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and factory workers alike.



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...the story of Port Clinton over the last half-century — like the history of America over these decades — is not simply about the collapse of the working class but also about the birth of a new upper class. In the last two decades, just as the traditional economy of Port Clinton was collapsing, wealthy professionals from major cities in the Midwest have flocked to Port Clinton, building elaborate mansions in gated communities along Lake Erie and filling lagoons with their yachts. By 2011, the child poverty rate along the shore in upscale Catawba was only 1 percent, a fraction of the 51 percent rate only a few hundred yards inland. As the once thriving middle class disappeared, adjacent real estate listings in the Port Clinton News Herald advertised near-million-dollar mansions and dilapidated double-wides.

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The contrast with the egalitarian ethos and reality of the 1950s — the contrast between the upward mobility experienced by J and the bleak prospects of R — vividly captures Port Clinton’s transformation in the last half-century, much like that of the rest of the country. My research team has talked with dozens of R’s from Austin, Tex., to Duluth, Minn., and from Atlanta to Orange County, Calif.

The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of “we.” Everyone in my parents’ generation thought of J as one of “our kids,” but surprisingly few adults in Port Clinton today are even aware of R’s existence, and even fewer would likely think of her as “our kid.” Until we treat the millions of R’s across America as our own kids, we will pay a major economic price, and talk of the American dream will increasingly seem cynical historical fiction.


xlnt article (mho)
MORE:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/crumbling-american-dreams/

[frazzled]

1. Well, not a historical fiction, but certainly disappearing for the past 3 decades

and becoming a fiction. That's what Obama's incessant speeches have been about.

But that dream was real for at least large segments of American society (leaving out the very important question of race) for a significant swath of the twentieth century. My own grandparents, on both sides, came to this country early in the 20th century with only the clothes on their backs, and all their children went to college and bought houses, and ... well, let's just say that though none of them became rich or famous, their lives were immeasurably better than those of their hardworking parents, and especially the lives their parents would have lived as peasants, and victims of pogroms, in the Old Country.

It's true that this dream has never materialized for a great many in the African American community. This is a historical legacy of our nation's very founding that we will continue to grapple with for god knows how long. It's the American shame, and the American "nightmare."