What We Mean by the American Dream

Stories We Tell about Meritocracy

Doron Taussig

• Editorial: ILR Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501754692
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Social Classes & Economic Disparity

Doron Taussig invites us to question the American Dream. Did you earn what you have? Did everyone else?

The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream, Taussig tries to find out how we answer those questions.

Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life—as well as stories told in the US media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business— What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not.

Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by—and how we can deliver on—the American Dream of today.

1

American Idols

Every chance Carly Fiorina got when she was a candidate in the Republican presidential primary in 2016, the former Hewlett-Packard head told audiences that she had gone “from secretary to CEO.” She used the line in stump speeches and debates. She bought the URL fromsecretarytoceo.com. Fiorina also called herself “self-made” and claimed that her story was possible “only in America.” The imagery was at the core of her candidacy.

Then a curious thing happened. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker published a column slapping Fiorina with a “three Pinocchio” rating for her secretary-to-CEO claim.1 Three Pinocchios, according to the Post, indicates a claim that contains “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.” Such claims are “mostly false” but “could include statements which are technically correct (such as based on official government data) but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading.” The Post chose this rating despite verifying that Fiorina had in fact worked as a secretary before she became a CEO.

The problem with Fiorina’s claim, wrote Fact Checker reporter Michelle Ye Hee Lee, is that “it evokes a rags-to-riches-esque narrative. . . . Fiorina uses a familiar, ‘mailroom to boardroom’ trope of upward mobility that the public is familiar with, yet her story is nothing like that.” The candidate, the Post explained, was the daughter of Joseph Sneed, who was a prominent attorney, a federal judge, a deputy attorney general in the Nixon administration, and the dean of Duke University School of Law. Fiorina attended Stanford, where her tuition likely was paid in full by Duke as part of her father’s compensation. Though she worked a number of secretarial jobs during and after college, “she always intended to attend graduate school for her career.” Fiorina had not hidden or denied these facts, but, the Post argued, she told an “only-in-America” story despite enjoying many “only-for-Fiorina” opportunities.

The column set off a mini-firestorm. On Fox News, Howard Kurtz called the piece a “misfire” (he awarded the paper “four Pinocchios”).2 Fiorina said the story “sort of floored me,”3 and on social media and in the paper’s comments section, readers sounded off. Partly the conflagration was about whether evoked narratives should be the province of fact checkers. But partly it was about the validity of Fiorina’s claims and the Post’s critique.

Those who sided with the Post argued that Fiorina’s class background disqualified her from self-made status and from the “rags-to-riches” trajectory they thought she had claimed. Her rise had not been unlikely, they said, which meant it didn’t match what she was describing. Several went further and suggested that the candidate’s success had been largely predetermined by her socioeconomic advantages. She was “bound for some kind of top-tier job practically from the cradle,” wrote the blogger Kevin Drum at Mother Jones.4 A commenter named Claire Sparks on the Post’s website argued, “If we all had parents who could get us all free rides to an Ivy League school, we could all be CEOs.”5

Among Fiorina’s defenders, some contended that the candidate’s advantages had not been as great as her critics suggested. “Being the daughter of a law professor, or of a law school dean, hardly puts her in the .0001%. Upper middle class at most,” wrote another Post commenter named BurbankBob. Others argued that Fiorina’s socioeconomic edge was neutralized by her gender disadvantage. “There is one important reality that is lost on Ms. Lee,” wrote the commenter Lee Pelletier. “Women who came of age in the 70s faced very tough odds, including those who were daughters of power.”6

Finally, some of Fiorina’s defenders resisted the suggestion that the candidate’s achievements could or should be contextualized in relation to her family at all. “This article is an absolute joke,” an Ohio county commissioner named Brian Stewart tweeted at the Washington Post.7 “She was a secretary, and she became a CEO, but you call her a liar bc her dad was lawyer.” In a post at the conservative site NewsBusters, Tom Blumer wrote: “The candidate isn’t claiming rags-to-riches. . . . She’s claiming that she worked hard, and smart, and took advantage of the opportunities presented.”8

Whether or not Fiorina implied that she rose from rags to riches, she clearly meant to suggest that she had risen up the ranks of American society through merit. And so it’s worth noting the extent to which her claim was not accepted at face value. Many observers, including people with prominent mainstream media platforms, openly questioned whether Fiorina’s success was the product of a meritocratic process. Nor is this phenomenon unique to Carly Fiorina. It is actually rather astounding, given Americans’ reputation for believing that we live in a meritocracy, how often we reject or question this premise when thinking and talking about the people at the top.

In this chapter I make the case that even in instances of extreme achievement—the paragons, the winners, the people whose merit should be most obvious and who have long been understood as symbols of meritocracy—American culture tends to debate or evaluate the role of merit in success rather than accept it. I’ll take a look at how we argue about whether people like Carly Fiorina deserve to be where they are and ask what our uncertainty about the Big Shots means for the rest of us.

Triumph of the Mass Idols

In 1944 a sociologist named Leo Lowenthal published a paper examining “biographies” of public figures from two mainstream American magazines, Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Lowenthal was a German refugee and a member of the “Frankfurt School” of theorists who became known for (among other things) turning a critical eye toward the mass culture they encountered in the United States, identifying in it some of the indoctrinating qualities they had witnessed under fascism. Lowenthal argued that these magazine biographies, which we would now call profiles, had changed over time. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the bios had focused on “idols of production,” major figures from the worlds of politics and business, and presented them as “examples of success which can be imitated.” Biographies from around the early 1940s were more frequently about “idols of consumption,” major figures from the worlds of sports and entertainment. For these latter heroes, success was portrayed as “an accidental and irrational event,” the result of lucky breaks. Lowenthal dubbed this evolution the “triumph of the mass idols” and viewed it as a symptom of societal decline.9

The idea that American media portray success as accidental didn’t stick. But in making his argument, Lowenthal embraced a premise that has proved resonant: the idols of a society reflect its socioeconomic conditions, as well as the ways people think and feel about those conditions.10 That is to say, the stories we tell about public figures reveal and reinforce the public’s sense of how society works at any given time, and specifically the question of who succeeds and why. Of course, other kinds of stories beyond the life stories of famous people reflect these cultural tenets too, and meritocracy is a theme in myriad genres of American narrative. The nineteenth-century author Horatio Alger became so well known for his fictional stories about characters rising from humble roots that his name remains shorthand for tales of self-made success. Hollywood movies,11 reality television,12 sitcoms,13 and news stories14 have all been analyzed for their portrayal—and usually boosterism—of American meritocracy. The theme is not hard to find. The Little Engine That Could teaches children that if they work hard, anything is possible. But for explanations of success and failure, nonfiction portrayals of celebrities and public figures have remained of particular interest to cultural analysts.15

Fiorina, for example, was joining a long, if not especially proud, tradition among presidential candidates in spinning her meritocratic tale. In a study of presidential campaign films, which introduce candidates to the broad public at national party conventions, media critic Joanne Morreale observes that in the biographical portions of the films, “candidates often come from humble beginnings, but work hard to become successful. Whenever possible, they are described as poor, although hard work, determination, and commitment to education enables them to succeed. The candidates conform to the American ideal of success embodied by the rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger myth. The individual who strives to achieve can overcome economic hardships.”16

From Abraham Lincoln’s being born in a log cabin to Barack Obama’s being raised by a single mother, candidates who could credibly point back to the humble roots from whence they came have done so, emphasizing the role of merit in their rise. Similar stories get told about rich people who aren’t running for president. The yarns spun about business leaders and entrepreneurs are frequently driven by the “self-made myth,” the notion “that individual and business success is the result of personal characteristics of exceptional individuals, such as hard work, creativity, and sacrifice, with little or no outside assistance.”17

Star athletes and entertainers—Lowenthal’s idols of consumption—can serve as models of advancement through merit too. Cultural critics have identified sports heroes as common and effective vehicles for lessons about meritocracy. Sport, writes Michael Serazio, “consistently embeds a narrative that explains achievement in terms of meritocracy. Winners succeed, sports tell us, because they work hard.”18 Athletes as distant in time and context as Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan were presented as examples of the American Dream and the authors of their own success.19 Entertainers have also been molded by the iconographers who write about them to embody the self-made ideal. Reading coverage from celebrity magazines across the twentieth century, the sociologist Karen Sternheimer finds the American Dream surfacing as a theme throughout.20

The implication of this kind of story, most analysts agree, is that America is a meritocracy, or at least close enough. Celebrity stories suggest that “upward mobility is possible in America” and “inequality is the result of personal failure rather than systematic social conditions.”21 The sports narratives, by foregrounding hard work, “assure those who lack [athletic] talents—the vast majority of people—that they too can succeed,”22 and foster the illusion that “one day, the ‘ordinary but special’ individual consumer may realize his or her unique qualities, and join the ever-changing pantheon of celebrities.”23 The lesson we take, that winners “must have risen to the top through fair means and thus deserve their position,” writes Susan Birrell, is “insidious”: it encourages us to accept and support inequality.24

This does not mean, necessarily, that the stories fool us so much as that they invite us to “collude” with the meritocratic fantasy, as Sternheimer explains it. “The myth of mobility makes Americans feel good about ourselves and is woven into our sense of nationalism.”25

There’s a great deal that these analyses get right about American culture and the pervasiveness of messages about meritocracy. But I’m going to argue that it’s important to note how conversations about high achievers also regularly grapple with the possibility of unmeritocratic outcomes. In published stories of the lives of politicians, business magnates, and star athletes, meritocracy is less consistently constructed as a societal reality than as an ideal. Again, a former CEO and presidential candidate was called a liar by one of the most prestigious news outlets in the country for saying she rose from secretary to CEO. An individual’s merit is an open question in American culture, and we ought to consider how we answer it.

“Why Should He Even Be There?”: Meritocracy in Politics

The first recorded biographical campaign literature in American politics was distributed by Andrew Jackson, and its themes, if not its particulars, would be familiar today: Jackson was portrayed as a simple “soldier-farmer,” both a man of...