Dream Hospice

Thoughts on the death of the American Dream

This is a final post on the relationship between religion and the American Dream. Hope you’ve enjoyed them. —Jim

Religions of all kinds counsel believers not to get too invested in earthly regimes, whether because they will obstruct our ability to experience what’s truly valuable in this world, or what lies beyond it. It was no less an authority than King David who reputedly made this point to the Israelites in Psalm 146:

Put not your trust in princes,

in human beings, who cannot save.

When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;

on that very day their plans come to nothing.

Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob,

whose hope is in the Lord their God.

I first heard the first line of this psalm uttered in 1990 by playwright Horton Foote, who provided the voice of Jefferson Davis for the famous nine-part Ken Burns documentary The Civil War. It comes at the end of an episode for 1863, with Confederacy at a low point, and Burns inserts the psalm in the form of a voiceover quote from Davis exhorting his fellow Confederates to steel themselves for coming privations and keep their eyes on the prize of freedom (including the freedom to own slaves). You can hear the weariness in Foote’s marvelously nuanced delivery—the strain of putting a brave face on gathering disaster—and I found myself sympathizing with Davis’s commitment to his lost cause even as I hoped I would have been an instrument of its destruction had I been alive at the time.

Davis represented an American Dream that died in the Civil War, a dream of ease that rested on the exploitation of others, as so many dreams do. As far as I can tell, Davis was a decent man by the standards of his time, even if what he stood for was monstrous. (I expect the same will be said for many of us whom history sees fit to remember and that we early twenty-first century Americans on the whole will be seen as a pretty self-righteous bunch.) But the death of the Confederate American Dream gave new life and legitimacy to the American Dream as a whole. It gave it a new moral worth.

For over a century and a half now, the American Dream’s legitimacy has rested on more than a belief that aspirations can become realities. And it’s rested on more than a belief that the Dream is permissible in these United States, or more plausible than in other places. It’s also rested on a belief that the Dream is both morally good and the sound basis of a just society. Such notions have been remarkably durable.

Long after the religious underpinnings of the nation’s founding have been removed, the faded outlines of the English Protestant project continue to shape our collective moral imagination in a simple but powerful moral code: that which regards the Dream as open to all is good; that which stands in its way is evil. This standard is so deeply wired in our collective psyche that we barely pause to think about it. We’ve had our differences over the means. But our end, our belief in the necessity for the structural soundness of the Dream, has always been shared, and the big changes that have happened in our national life since the Civil War (suffrage for women, the welfare state, the Civil Rights movement) have been enacted in the name of its preservation.

Nowadays, however, our consensus about the American Dreamt is eroding: more and more of us view it as irredeemably fraudulent. Growing numbers of people have failed in their pursuit of the Dream, or have decided its pursuit is a fool’s errand. This collective sense of disenchantment is hard to measure, but it’s powerful and destructive. If a good culture is defined as one where anyone can rise, and it becomes evident to most people that no one really can, then what can take its place? It’s hard not to see a future that lurches between anarchy and authoritarianism.

Maybe my investment in the Dream is blinding me to the viability of other alternatives. As William James said, “We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much less, than any disbelievers in them might possess.” This is what constitutes optimism by my lights: that the new order will not be as bad as I fear.

Unlike some of my fellow Americans, my problem with the Dream has never been about a lack of fervor (I have more reason than most for my faith). I’m not so much disillusioned as I am haunted, as I have been all along. I’m drawn to the sweet song of William James, yearning to affirm that my American Dream is beautiful, and true, and right. So much so that I dwell in that world most days, most of the time. But another song, from another world, beckons. I don’t want to choose between God and Country. Still, I know where my final loyalty should go.

But not yet.