Rakibul Alam:

WHEN John Locke wrote ‘In the beginning, all the world was America,’ he was referring specifically to the absence of a cash nexus in primitive society. But the sentence evokes the unsullied newness, infinite possibility, limitless resources that are commonly understood to be the essence of the ‘American dream.’ Since the first settlers arrived, various versions of the American Dream have existed. The idea of the American dream has been attached to everything from religious freedom to a home in the suburbs, and it has inspired emotions ranging from deep satisfaction to disillusioned fury. Nevertheless, the phrase elicits for most Americans some variant of Locke’s fantasy — a brave new world where anything can happen, and good things might. There were many versions of the American Dream which existed from the day the first settlers came up to present-day America.

Although James Truslow Adams coined the term ‘American Dream’ in his book The Epic of America (1931), it was not a new idea. It was the promise of happiness, prosperity, and success through hard work that lured the earliest settlers to America as a land of opportunity. The first settlement of New England and tobacco farming in Virginia ensued a gold rush to America which never seized. A major American worldview for many years — if not centuries — has been the American dream. The promise that all Americans have a fair chance to achieve success — material or otherwise — by their own efforts and to attain virtue and satisfaction through accomplishment is the ‘American dream,’ which is more than just the right to become affluent. Although it is a brilliant notion, its flaws as a practical guide may be equal to or even greater than its strengths.

Primarily, it is not held by all Americans equally. Its distribution among American groups has always been uneven; at various moments in history, its supremacy has swelled or faded; its definition has varied, as have those of its rivals. But the American dream has been a defining aspect of American culture, ambitions, and — at least ostensibly —institutions, against which all rivals must struggle to sustain themselves.

Prior to the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama wrote the book namely The Audacity of Hope: Reclaiming the American Dream. In that book, we can easily trace the contemporary interpretations of the American Dream and the optimistic hope that the ‘ideology’ behind this dream has inspired among the public. There have been many such attempts to define the American Dream, which has become one of the most deeply ingrained ideologies that define the very existence of Americans. It began as a quest for upward mobility and expanded to include a lavish lifestyle and home ownership. And everyone knows — an ideology is very often thicker than blood.

The American Dream has been a metaphor for success, happiness, and prosperity for all. Millions of immigrants and internal migrants have migrated to and within America to chase this American dream. Many have succeeded through objective measures and their own accounts. Also, many have been defeated and disillusioned. Millions of other immigrants — predominantly but not exclusively from Africa — were moved to America despite their preferences and have been forced to come to terms with ‘a dream’ that was not originally theirs.

Louis Althusser made use of two concepts that might help us to probe into the ideological premises of the American Dream. Firstly, he talks about ‘ideological state apparatus’ which may be further defined as state apparatuses such as schools, hospitals, etc. Then, the concept of ‘repressive ideological state apparatus’ which comprises political forces, police, and army.

It is understandable how the political superstructure or repressive ideological state apparatus popularised the American Dream to convince the masses that they could achieve happiness, prosperity, and success through hard work. This meant that anyone who worked hard enough could find success and live the American Dream. The American Dream was a ruling ideology used by the political base, i.e., the rulers, as well as the repressive state apparatus, namely the army and the police, and at times by the religious base, the church, to dupe the poor masses or proletariat (working classes) into believing that by following the ‘success mantra’ of the American Dream even an ordinary man can become rich.

The American dream consists of tenets of achieving success. People frequently describe success as having a high income, a prestigious position, and financial security. However, as American president Reagan once pointed out, monetary well-being is simply one type of accomplishment. People desire success from the pulpit to the Metropolitan Opera, from the newest dance club to the Senate. Different kinds of success need not conflict, but often do.

A definition of success includes both measurement and content. There are at least three ways to measure success, each having significant normative and behavioral consequences. Firstly, it can be absolute. In this category, fulfilling the American dream means reaching a greater level of well-being, but not necessarily dazzling. Second, success might be relative. In this context, achieving the American dream implies becoming better off than some comparison point, whether it is one’s upbringing, individuals from the old country, one’s neighbours, a character from a book, another race or gender — anything or anyone against whom one compares oneself.

The first tenet inherent in the American Dream that everyone can participate equally and can always start over is troubling to the degree that it is not true. Of course, this is never true in the most literal sense; individuals cannot shed their actual selves like snakes do their skin. So, the myth of the individual mini-state of nature is just that — a fiction to be chased but never achieved. Fantasies are fine as long as everyone understands what they are. Therefore, a milder articulation of the first tenet — people start the pursuit of success with varied advantages, but no one is barred — is more troubling because the difference between an ideological claim and actual reality is harder to recognise. As a factual claim, the first tenet is mainly incorrect; women of any race and Native American, Asian, black, or poor men were barred from most ‘electable futures.’

This flaw goes beyond racism and sexism. The emotional potency of the American dream has made people who can relate to it the norm for everyone else. White men, particularly European immigrants who were able to ride the wave of the Industrial Revolution (and benefit from the absence of competition from the rest of the population) to comfort or even prosperity, epitomise America as the bountiful state of nature held on to this idea more closely than others. Those who don’t fit disappear from the collective self-portrait.

The irony is twofold. Not only has the ideal of universal participation been denied to most Americans, but also its very denial has been calculatedly obliterated from the manufactured national self-image. This double irony leads to major misunderstandings and, as a result, major political tensions. One such tension is that the white community increasingly believe that racial discrimination is slight and declining, while blacks increasingly perceive the opposite. The underlying point remains — no one promises dreams will be fulfilled, but the gap between the right to dream and the right to succeed is psychologically and politically blurry. It is especially difficult to sustain since the dream only protects Americans from daily nightmares if they believe they have a significant likelihood, not just a formal chance, of reaching their goals. In short, the right to aspire to success works as an ideological substitute for a guarantee of success. When people recognise that chances for success are slim or getting slimmer, the whole tenor of the American dream dramatically changes for the worse.

From William Shakespeare to William Faulkner, writers have limned the loneliness of being at the top, the spiritual costs of cutthroat competition, and the shallowness of a society that rewards achievement above all else. Not only nineteenth-century romantics cautioned against the failures of success. Today psychotherapists specialise in helping ‘troubled winners’ or the ‘working wounded,’ for whom ‘a life too much devoted to pursuing money, power, position, and control over others ends up being emotionally impoverished.’ In short, material — and perhaps other forms of — success is not all it’s cracked up to be, even (or especially) in a nation where it is the centerpiece of the pervasive ideology.

Moreover, American history and popular culture are replete with demonstrations of the connection between failure and sin. Small wonder that in the late twentieth century even the poor blamed the poor for their condition. Despite her vivid awareness of exploitation by the rich, an aging cleaning woman could, therefore, insist that many people are poor because they ‘make the money and drink it all up. They don’t care about the kids or the clothes. Just have a bottle on that table all the time.’ In this strange dream, ‘losers’ even start blaming themselves.

The ideology of the American dream is flawed. One problem stems from the radical individualism often associated with the dream — achievers mark their success by moving away from the tenement, ghetto, or holler of their impoverished and impotent youth, thus speeding the breakup of their ethnic community. This is a bittersweet phenomenon. The freedom to move up and out is desirable or at least desired. But certainly, those left behind, probably those who leave, and arguably the nation as a whole loses when groups of people with close cultural and personal ties break those ties in pursuit of or after attaining ‘the bitch-goddess, success.’ The border between autonomy and atomism becomes difficult to define, indeed.

All these elements of the dream make it extremely difficult for Americans to see that everyone cannot simultaneously attain more than absolute success. Capitalist markets require some firms to fail; elections require some candidates and policy preferences to lose; status hierarchies must have a bottom in order to have a top. But the optimistic language of and methodological individualism built into the American dream necessarily deceives people about these societal operations. Often our basic institutions are designed to ensure that some fail, at least relatively, and the dream does nothing to help Americans cope with or even recognise that fact.

The greatest way for Americans to ensure a better future for their children is to demand that the actualisation of the American dream should be brought into line with its ‘ideals’. In other words, Americans must confront their ideal contrapuntally and determine whether they actually intend for it to become a reality or not.

Rakibul Alam is a lecturer in English in the Bangladesh Army University of Engineering and Technology, Natore