The Politics of the American Dream

Democratic Inclusion in Contemporary American Political Culture

C. Ghosh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349450053, 9781137289049
• eBook ISBN: 9781137289056
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

The Politics of the American Dream analyzes the role of the 'American Dream' in contemporary American political culture. Utilizing analytic political theory, Ghosh creates a unique picture of Dream Politics, and shows the effect on the landscape of American politics.

1

Introduction

1.1 Preliminary observations

This book analyzes the role of the American Dream in contemporary American political culture.¹ Between the years 1900 and 1964, the word “dream” appeared twice in presidential inaugurals, six times in State of the Union messages, and four times in (Democratic and Republican) party platforms—a total of 12 occurrences. In sharp contrast, between 1964 and 2010, the same word appeared 27 times in presidential inaugurals, 91 times in State of the Union messages, and 112 times in (Democratic and Republican) party platforms—a total of 230 occurrences.² Obviously, something unusual is going on in the mid-1960s. Since then, references to the American Dream have increased somewhat dramatically, as leaders across the ideological spectrum have invoked the Dream’s promises.³ These observations are not simply true of the genres of speeches cited here: namely, presidential inaugurals, State of the Union messages, and party platforms. Indeed, Dream rhetoric permeates entire political campaigns, such as the Barack Obama presidential campaign of 2008.

The financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the ensuing recession years, soaring unemployment, and the subprime mortgage crisis that left hundreds of thousands of people without shelter have had no apparent impact on the popularity of the American Dream. Although not all people believe in its promises, most people continue to think the Dream is either achievable or ought to be achievable. Belief in the tenets of the Dream, it appears, has remained fairly stable over the last several decades.

Jennifer Hochschild’s work is canonical in this regard. In 1995, she wrote Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation , in which she persuasively claimed that “the American dream is, and has been, for decades if not centuries, a central ideology of Americans.”⁴ The data from the 2000s validates this position too. In 2004, roughly two-thirds of all Americans thought they were living the American Dream.⁵ Even families making less than $30,000 a year subscribed to the Dream in 2005—more than half said they had achieved it or would do so.⁶ In 2006, when 600 local residents in Boston were asked if they were living the American Dream, 68 percent responded in the affirmative.⁷ Even in 2010, one survey reported that 67 percent of the respondents claimed they could achieve the American Dream in their lifetimes.⁸ Belief in the promises of the American Dream is particularly strong among immigrants and racial minorities.⁹ People have divergent views about what the American Dream stands for and, often, they interpret their own lived experience as representative of, or as tending toward achieving, the American Dream.

These bewildering observations invite us to pause and think about the role of the American Dream in contemporary American political culture.¹⁰ They also gesture toward the urgent need for a rigorous analysis of this somewhat amorphous concept. This book is a first cut into exactly such an exercise. In the following chapters, I address four questions that I think are fundamental to any understanding of the American Dream’s role in contemporary American politics:

(i)	What is the American Dream?
(ii)	Why do political leaders invoke the Dream in making appeals to their constituencies?
(iii)	What explains the Dream’s ubiquity and popularity?
(iv)	What features of American Dream rhetoric enable its invocation by leaders across the ideological spectrum?

In Part I, I take up the first question. In doing so, I offer a “concept-formation” exercise in which I demonstrate why the American Dream is an “essentially contested concept” that does not lend itself easily to definitions.¹¹ Yet, a definition of the Dream might nonetheless be proposed if one pays attention to, and builds upon, the Dream’s constitutive elements (or “deep structures”).¹² These constitutive elements are individualism, equal opportunity or level playing field, and (some form of) success/happiness. In the absence of any one or more of these constitutive elements, we can have neither a meaningful instantiation nor a linguistic uptake of the specific locution: “American Dream.” Arguably, some other items, such as hard work, luck, or liberty, might be included in this list. But, as I explain in greater detail in Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.2), there are good reasons for excluding these terms from this list. Belief in the values of the American Dream, I claim, is one important way of thinking about American national identity. But it is not the only way. Competing narratives of American national identity based on language, religion, race, and culture—such as a recent one proposed by Samuel Huntington—also circulate widely.¹³ But such competing narratives are, as I will contend in the concluding section of Part I, untenable in the long run.

The second question this book addresses is: Why do contemporary political leaders employ the American Dream as a rhetorical device? In Part II, I offer what I think is the most plausible explanation for this phenomenon. The American Dream serves as a model of democratic inclusion in contemporary American political culture—one that enables it to transcend, as it were, the politics of immigration and identity. Traditional models of democratic inclusion rely broadly either on a model of differentiation or on a model of dedifferentiation. Differentiation takes the idea of difference seriously and (often unsuccessfully) attempts to promise democratic inclusion to all identity groups, as in the case of, say, state-sponsored multiculturalism in Britain or Canada. Dedifferentiated inclusion, on the other hand, occurs when the state denies difference and assumes a neutral position with regard to identity, and accords an abstract individualism to all members of the polity, as in the case of state-sanctioned colorblindness or rigid secularism, as in, say, France.

Most liberal democracies have some kind of a hybrid of these two models of democratic inclusion but each puts more emphasis on one model or the other. Unfortunately, however, both models of democratic inclusion are riddled with problems and ultimately leave certain sections of their polities dissatisfied with the state. But what is important for our purposes here is that the rhetoric of the American Dream offers a slightly different model of democratic inclusion that successfully avoids the contradictions of both the differentiation and the dedifferentiation models. This ability to neither be exaggeratedly neutral nor be radically multicultural has enabled the use of the American Dream as a convenient and relatively successful model (and rhetoric) of democratic inclusion, particularly in the post-1965 period—an era marked by “open” immigration and the rise of the New Left. This is not to say that there are no residual controversies about the nature and extent of democratic inclusion in America. However, it is very much the case that the United States has managed to avoid some of the contradictions of heavily relying on either the differentiation or the dedifferentiation models. And, as I will demonstrate in this part of the book, the American Dream’s rhetoric of democratic inclusion has played an important role in this.

In Part III, I analyze the reasons for the Dream’s ubiquity and popularity. In doing so, I turn to the Dream’s foundations. The contemporary American Dream is a continuation of a “Lockean sympathy” in American political culture that starts with the Puritan settlers of New England and persists over time. As I point out here, the Dream is predicated upon a specific triangular relationship that imbricates work, virtue, and happiness. The Dream itself may be relatively new (and an artifact of the twentieth century), but this interrelationship of work, virtue, and happiness is not. It may be traced back to the Horatio Alger (the popular writer of stories of little American boys starting off poor and finishing rich)ethic, the Founding, and indeed all the way back to Locke and the Protestant ethic of New England Puritans. The affinities the contemporary idea of the American Dream shares with the primordial values that structure the national imagination explains, in crucial part, the Dream’s ubiquity, popularity, and emotional potency.

When I speak of affinities, I mean just that: affinities. Ideas evolve over time. They influence other ideas. History, one might suggest, offers “a kind of reservoir that later generations can drink from.”¹⁴ Every succeeding generation selects ideas from its past and uses them as it sees fit. In the case of the American Dream, a specific relationship between the ideas of work, virtue, and happiness has remained relatively stable over time. At various historical/ideological moments—in Locke, among the Puritan settlers of New England, in the Founding era, in the Horatio Alger ethic, and in the contemporary American Dream—this relationship has given rise to specific types of social interactions, but the basic structure of the relationship itself has remained relatively unchanged.

In demonstrating these patterns of continuity and change, however, my purpose is not to show causality (in the sense that one or more of these historical moments caused the other) but, instead, to show that one follows the other as a disciple might follow a mentor— slowly learning and socializing herself with the values of the mentor until a point comes when we can trace a lineage between the disciple’s attributes and her mentor’s, even though there might be no genetic (causal) connections between the two.

Part IV takes up the question regarding the Dream’s invocation by political elites across the ideological spectrum. Political leaders and their intended audiences may appear to transact in the same currency of the American Dream, but the specific linguistic connotations and meanings they exchange depend entirely on the context of the Dream’s articulation. The Dream appears to be elastic enough that leaders across the ideological spectrum can invoke it with seemingly equal facility. Yet, as I will argue here, the Dream is not infinitely elastic. Each of the constitutive elements of the Dream can accommodate a range of meanings. But these ranges are not unbounded. Individualism, for instance, can refer to an atomistic and rugged individualism, but it might just as well insinuate a moral individualism based on what Tocqueville calls “habits of kindness.”¹⁵ Similarly, equal opportunity or a level playing field can refer to either equal starting points or roughly equal outcomes. Finally, the concept of success is eternally amorphous, although the two generic types of success referred to in the American Dream typically tend to be either “private” (say, in the form of individual upward mobility) or “public” (say, in the form of widespread abundance and prosperity). The politics of multiple meanings associated with each of these terms affords the Dream its elasticity. It will be the burden of chapters 5 and 6 to clarify the range of interpretations the Dream accommodates, such that leaders across the ideological spectrum can invoke its promises with seemingly equal facility, although they might affirm very dissimilar politics even as they do so.

In the concluding chapter, I offer some remarks about future directions of this scholarship. In addition, I briefly address three questions related to the overall analysis presented here. First, if, as I suggest in this book, work is always connected to virtue, what does this imply for undocumented work and undocumented workers in the United States? Second, is the American Dream’s model of democratic inclusion something that other countries can emulate? Finally, is the American Dream’s prominent place in contemporary American political rhetoric a historical blip? Or will it remain an enduring feature of American political talk in upcoming decades?

To be sure, many scholars have offered impressive explorations of the American Dream in recent years: particularly in the fields of political sociology, history, American Studies, and American political thought.¹⁶ Some critical theorists have also engaged with the question, thus examining, for example, the “hegemonic” content of the American Dream.¹⁷ Yet, political scientists in general, and political theorists in particular, have shied away from any rigorous analysis of this concept. This is odd, given that theorists routinely offer analytic examinations of various kinds of political ideologies. Yet, for one reason or another, there is an inexplicable paucity of scholarly work on the American Dream as an ideological construct in the tradition of analytic political theory. This is probably an artifact of the slippery and “essentially contested” nature of the concept itself. But, in the same breath, one might suggest that there are other, equally amorphous and contestable concepts—such as individualism, liberalism, ideology, citizenship, indeed even the concept of “politics” itself—that theorists have examined and re-examined ad infinitum.

Particularly given the prominence of the American Dream in contemporary American political talk, this scholarly vacuum, indeed negligence, is breathtaking. Perhaps political theorists, like most people in the United States, assume the concept to be self-evident to the point that it requires, or even merits, no further clarification. Yet, as I hope to show throughout the course of this book, this is not even remotely the case. As an ideological construct, the American Dream has several meanings, represents many different sets of values, and entails various political uses. I think the discipline of political science will be enriched if more scholarly attention is paid to the Dream’s role in contemporary politics. Of course, the analysis presented in this book is by no manner or means the final word on the topic. But, I very much hope it is the beginning of a conversation. I sincerely believe that future scholars will refine and develop on the work presented here and, in doing so, expand our collective understanding of this important concept.

In recent years two scholars, Jim Cullen¹⁸ and Calvin Jillson,¹⁹ have written monographs tracing the genealogies of the values embedded in the American Dream. Jim Cullen presents the various incarnations of the Dream and their overlapping meanings in the thematically and chronologically organized The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation. From his broad historical perspective, Cullen narrates the story of the various American Dreams that have shaped American identity from the Puritans’ to present times. He presents a vast, linear narrative encompassing most political, spiritual, socioeconomic, and cultural values that have been in popular circulation in American history. His many versions of the Dream provide an expert, variegated taxonomy of American national beliefs and national moods but it is impossible to identify any one of his “Dreams” as the principal American Dream. The reason for this is Cullen’s in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index