Jerry Landay
April 23, 2006

The Flight of the American Dream

You can't stuff the real world into a cramped ideology. It took the Radicalized Republicans 30 years to put their master plan into operation, underwritten by millions of dollars of patronage by far-right foundations and large injections of private wealth. It's only taken less than two years for the plan to catch fire and burn.

Narrow ideology is no substitute for ideas coupled to action, for minds coupled to heart. George Bush had neither. He knew what he wanted to do on taxes -- cut them for the privileged; on government -- turn it into a piggy bank for his cronies; on Social Security and Medicare -- "reform" them into submission; on what to do with kids -- test them into cookie-cutter conformists. But he just sat there when Al Qaeda slammed airplanes into the World Trade Center. He just sat there when his buddies in the Congress sent the deficit plunging into the depths. He just sat there when Hurricane Katrina destroyed a major American city. He just sat there while his bureaucrats rubber-stamped the Dubai ports deal. His ideology couldn't serve up the ready answers to those crises. Nor could his neocon ideologues. They sit there while Iraq spins into hemorrhage of lives, squandered money, and lost opportunities.

Columnist Paul Krugman exults prematurely that this is promising to be a Democrat/liberal Springtime, and concludes that "the high-water mark of a conservative tide...is now receding." But the flood wreckage the Democrats will have to deal with is catastrophic, incalculable. It includes a war without end, a foreign policy and our global repute in ruins, America's petroleum economy confronting chaos, religious division that continues to polarize the nation, and the public in a daze of confusion and anger. For Americans must confront another devastating loss: the End of the American Dream.

If they didn't quite know what that oft-invoked myth stood for, they are learning what they are losing when it goes. We assumed The American Dream was our birthright, whatever it meant. We now realize it was founded on endless plenty and a bottomless cup. And we realize now that it is beginning to fade for more and more of us. The components of The Dream were realized in the form of steady jobs, inexpensive home mortgages, cheap credit, gasoline at bargain-basement prices to propel our late-model cars, secure pensions, and flag-waving confidence in imperial America, a global power that could do no wrong. The neocons tipped America into decline. And visions of the American lifestyle are going with it.

The Dream -- powerful, pervasive, energizing, and defining -- has been holy writ for the middle class. But today, ask the 20,000 union workers at bankrupt Delphi who face permanent layoffs to define The American Dream , while thousands of others confront the prospect of having their own pay cut in half. Or, the thousands more union and salaried workers at General Motors and Ford, once the world's auto-and-truck leaders, now in retreat as their home market is dominated by gas-saving foreign cars. Or the retired guys who've just been told by the company they served for decades that they're being stripped of their pension security and health benefits.

Or young homeowners lured by cash-free mortgages to buy homes an hour away by car from their work who are being forced to confront corrosive debt and the threat of foreclosure. Or the home-owning wannabes who find themselves priced out of the housing market altogether. Adding insult to injury, the redistribution of our dwindling wealth under the Bush reign widens the gulf between the wealth aristocracy and the rest of us. The American consumer economy is operating on two tiers. On top is the relative handful of the privileged, awash in cash and securities, filling airplane seats on expensive holidays, still madly building McMansions and second homes. A study by the New York Times tells us the Republicans' gratuitous tax cuts for investment income have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing tax burdens on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000. Unfazed by any of this, Mr. Bush continues to press Congress to make cuts permanent for the privileged while the national deficit goes through the roof. The rest of us are in a squeeze as interest rates slowly rise, and inflation with it, battling higher prices driven upward by climbing energy costs, ever-costlier medical care and drugs. Home foreclosure rates across the country are beginning to grow. They jumped an average 13 percent per month nationally at the end of 2005, with highs of 61 percent in Texas, 70 percent in Arkansas, 45 percent in New Mexico, 210 percent in W. Virginia, and 36 percent in Indiana and Ohio.

As for America's standing in the world at large, the fog of the endless Iraqi War has cost us friends it took two world wars to win. We discover yet again what we should have learned in Vietnam -- aggressive war is not glorious. American citizens who took pride in our previous triumphs see the reputation of this nation squandered in the world court of public opinion, reduced from a beacon of hope to a saber-rattling thug. We face a formless "war against terror" that Bush failed to deal with and can't be won. The result is the erosion of American power in the ruthless game of nations. Our ebbing might inspires reckless challenges from rogue leaders. Kim Jong-il of North Korea blithely ignores Washington's threats and proceeds to move his country into the nuclear club; Iran's theocrats follow with their nuclear plans ignoring Washington's bluster, and, together with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, make threats against our petroleum supplies. Globally, competition by Asian industrial powers for shrinking oil reserves makes Americans' free access to interstate highways and air lanes ever more expensive, threatening the assumed right of this high-octane NASCAR nation to cruise free and easy. Spicing the sea of trouble is the encroaching reality of climate change. All this converges into the making of a "perfect storm."

We high-consumption Americans, who haven't been asked to sacrifice much of anything since World War II, aren't used to belt-tightening or living with exponential uncertainties. The ultimate question, though unaddressed by politicians, pundits, sociologists, anthropologists, Democratic politicians, and all the rest of us, is how we will behave when it dawns that we are being forsaken by The American Dream. Will we find a healthy outlet in a constructive search for strong, visionary leaders within the democratic process who will redefine The Dream to fit our reduced circumstances? When dreams and expectations fall apart, some often respond with rage, hopelessness, or fear.

Is that how we will react? How many will flock furiously to follow dangerous demagogues who will preach certitude, offering false comfort in exchange for our freedom? How many will seek solace in radical religious frenzy and make a wrathful judgment on America, giving themselves over to witch hunts to root out "the infidels and the godless?" We have done that sort of thing before. In short, will the great ideas that created this land of the free and the home of the brave survive the departure of the good life that came to define The American Dream, and will we recover from what the Radicalized Republicans have inflicted on us?

Jerry Landay, a retired journalist who lives in Bristol, RI, writes frequently for Mediatransparency on current issues.