Don’t Believe That The American Dream Is Dead
Pessimism about America has become fashionable. It’s a dangerous narrative.
In 1991, my dad went to prison for being a Jew.
He was born in Azerbaijan—a former Soviet republic and predominantly Muslim country, although with a considerable Jewish population. Religion was suppressed in the Soviet Union, but my dad grew up in the shadow of a rich cultural tradition. In 1991, taking an engineering job at Azerbaijan’s first “tech firm,” his work ethic resulted in an early career victory in which he took a relatively senior position at the company. Around the same time, as the Soviet Union collapsed and Azerbaijan became an independent state, a few corrupt officials, jealous of his success, decided to frame him for money laundering.
With no set legal process in a new country, my dad was sent to prison. Wrongfully incarcerated for nine months, he reflected on an eerily similar anti-Semitic incident that had taken the life of his grandfather, who was beaten to death by the KGB after being accused of stealing government money.
You could say my family knows something about oppression. But my dad survived his unwarranted sentence by cunningly gaining the respect of a group of high-profile criminals, who helped him secure a parole-like reprieve after nine months in prison. By the time he got home, my grandparents had already been in contact with the U.S. government and, after a few months, the entire family escaped to America for political asylum. Forced to abandon his career and his possessions, my dad took the first plane of his life and found himself in O’Hare Airport in Chicago with a few stock English phrases and just $100 in his pocket.
My dad’s family spent their first several years in America living in, effectively, a Jewish ghetto. My aunt, who had accompanied my father, taught piano lessons for seven dollars an hour, and my dad—an engineer with a master’s degree in computer science—fried potatoes at Burger King. After using all of his money to buy a bicycle for his commute, he emerged from work the following week to find his bicycle stolen (coming from the USSR, where draconian policing made petty crime unknown, he didn’t understand that you had to lock your bike when you left it out in public). Eventually, he learned enough English to secure a job repairing computers in people’s homes (this was the ‘90s), and, after three years, saved up enough money to propose to my mom and buy the two-bedroom apartment that my parents still live in today.
I grew up in that same claustrophobic two-bedroom apartment. I did not understand why my spring break stories never featured the Eiffel Tower sightseeings and ski trip adventures that always cropped up in the recollections of my peers. But for my parents, who grew up in kommunalkas—communal Soviet apartments that often forced four or more people to share a single bedroom—that apartment was everything. Reaching the American middle class and the freedoms that came with it was far beyond anything they had ever dreamed of back in the Motherland.
The older I got, the more I became certain that I needed to give back. I learned equations and vectors, read every book I could lay my hands on, and, as a teenager, declined party invitations so I could work on my first novel. I spent the first seventeen years of my life not resentful of the modest circumstances I had grown up in but proud that my parents, immigrants and refugees, had succeeded in entering the American middle class. I knew they had sacrificed everything for the education of their two kids.
So when I was accepted to and matriculated at an Ivy League school, I was puzzled by how I was perceived. Almost immediately, I was no longer the introverted literature nerd who got into Columbia because she had committed the entire first book of Paradise Lost to memory and had written a novel. I was no longer the girl who had envied her peers for their large backyards and elaborate European vacations. I was no longer the Jewish student with unruly black hair and a family history of oppression.
Suddenly, I found myself cast as the privileged kid.
By the time I graduated and founded my own company, there was a consensus among my peers: No one believed that I could have figured out how to out-earn my parents and live the American Dream through my own work ethic. At a party, I was once asked how much of my dad’s money I had used to start up my company. (The answer was zero—we operate on a consulting model, which requires little upfront investment.) In response to a clip I posted that mentioned my Columbia education, I was told that I was a product of nepotism and must have been born rich. (A surprise since I’m still paying off the loans I took out to fund my education.) Even many of my friends react with disbelief when I tell them I grew up as an average middle-class kid. (This seems to undermine what they have internalized about the lack of social mobility in the U.S.) In the reflexive response of many of my peers, the inbuilt assumption was that I had only gotten to where I was because I enjoyed the privilege of being rich and white (Jews, of course, couldn’t possibly count as an oppressed minority group). I was, in short, not oppressed enough.
There’s a lot of buzz in our culture around the idea of “oppression.” Definitionally, the word refers to any sort of prolonged unjust treatment, but in our cultural lexicon, the word almost invariably refers to identity-based injustices. The University of Colorado Office of Equity’s “Matrix of Oppression,” to take one striking example, lists queer, working-class, atheist, polyamorous, and adolescent people, among others, as classically “oppressed” groups, and wealthy white heterosexual Christians as members of the privileged elite. Through the doctrine of “intersectionality,” being a member of one or more oppressed groups has become the hip thing on college campuses. Students who, often, come from wealthy backgrounds—students privileged enough to attend a four-year university and receive a world-class education—have somehow become convinced that they are oppressed and that, therefore, it is not worth it to work hard because the mysterious hand of oppression will shoot them down no matter what they do to pursue the American Dream.
As students digest ideologies of oppression like the one presented at the University of Colorado they will graduate into the workforce unduly pessimistic. Indeed, according to a poll conducted this January, nearly 70% of Americans believe that the American Dream is dead. Similarly, a 2023 National Opinion Research Center poll found that a full 50% of Americans believe that political and economic systems are stacked against them based on their identity. That profound, and irrational, skepticism towards the American Dream persists, even as, according to the Federal Reserve, American households have hit record wealth—and I suspect it is not just inflation that is to blame. If Americans are taught to believe that success is contingent on belonging to a certain identity group, then many of them will buy into the idea that the American Dream is unattainable.
I do understand that skepticism towards the American Dream comes from experiences that are very different from my family’s—that racial inequities are real and that the road to the American Dream is, often, far from smooth. But by focusing obsessively on shortcomings, so many Americans—young, educated Americans above all—have come to believe that upward mobility doesn’t exist. That widespread pessimism flies in the face of so much lived experience.
My own family is one of many examples of an immigrant success story. What they experienced is, in a word, exactly the dream that my dad was sold when hopping on that airplane. And if my parents’ example has taught me anything, it’s that hard work and resilience do count. I might not have grown up in a large suburban house (and we had no picket fence), but I come from a family that suffered genuine ethnicity-based oppression in the Soviet Union and in Azerbaijan and nonetheless kept on pushing. Based on what I’ve experienced in my own life, it is impossible to convince me that the American Dream has ended.
So let’s scrap this notion that America is inherently discriminatory and start teaching younger generations that America really is the land of opportunity. The American Dream is intact in our time, as it was for so many generations before. But in order to seize that opportunity, you do need to recognize it—to start with determination and hope.
Liza Libes founded her literary project, Pens and Poison, in New York City. Her writing has most recently appeared in The Hechinger Report, The American Spectator, and Minding the Campus.
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Well said, Ms Libes. I'm guessing almost all groups/ethnicities have been the target of oppression at one time or another throughout history. My mother's grandparents were native Irish victims of the Potato Famine and before that the British oppression of the Irish Catholics. They came here in the mid-late 1800s and established several small businesses in the Chicago area and later Alleghan Michigan. All 10 of their sons enlisted in the Armed Services during WWI.
What is important is that these groups, like those of your parents and those from other oppressive regimes or cultures overcame that in this country and did not wallow in their victimhood. Teaching our young people that there is anywhere near the level of oppression here that exists in many other countries is absurd.
I’m an old White Guy, someone who once would have been referred to as a WASP (don’t know if that’s still a concept), so I guess in a way I’m at another end of the spectrum Ms. Libes describes. My family has been in private education (both ElHi and collegiate) for half the time we’ve been a country; my paternal grandfather started teaching math at UPenn in 1894 and ending up Chair of the English Department and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. We also number among us three Independent school heads, one church preschool director, one college drama department head, and me (retired independent elementary school history teacher and division head) along with a fair assortment of lawyers, ministers, doctors, bankers and the like along the way.
I mention all that because I am proud of all of us, justifiably I believe, but more because of the sense of our history that we imbibed ‘along with our mothers’ milk’ due to the sheer love and appreciation of it in the hearts and minds of three plus generations of Americans (most of the family came over as a result of the Irish potato famine).
At the same time, teachers’ salaries being what they were when I was growing up, there were eight of us, so we lived with relatively tight belts, although I was certainly not unconscious of the wealth of many of my classmates at the independent school at which Dad taught and was later head (the only way he could have afforded my tuition even in that distant day).
Certainly when I was growing up in the aftermath of WWII (I was born exactly five months to the day before the Enola Gay opened up her bomb bay door over Hiroshima) there was a common feeling that we lived in a great country. The racial rumblings from the south which would become a roar before I was out of school were not clear to us along Philadelphia’s Main Line until I was well into high school, and the disaster of Vietnam was still only a vague dissonance from far away.
So I have lived through the apparent transformational period Ms Libes describes. I am certainly fully aware of reasons why Americans might now think us less than whatever promise we may once have believed. But that lack of appreciation is hardly new. You would have heard much the same kind of talk during the Great Depression, alongside the rise of populism during the Gilded Age and the time of the so-called Robber Barons, during the Civil War and the last two decades which preceded it, and intermingled with the election of Andrew Jackson. Indeed, one might have heard something like it during the presidential campaign of 1800, still one of the nastiest in our history.
We are a grand and exceptionally risky experiment, the first of its kind; perhaps the most extraordinary experiment in human government ever attempted. And we haven’t been at it for very long. I could have talked to a man who fought in the Civil War. A man who fought in that war could have talked to a man who fought in the Revolution and was present at the Founding. We are that young. We tend to forget that.
To me, and I’m sure it is the result of having taught our history for over 40 years, the problem is that we keep thinking that wherever we are now is some sort of finished product, etched in stone for all time. Despite all the rants about it, we don’t seem to have achieved American exceptionalism. What we forget in thinking that way is that our exceptionalism is not a given, but rather a promise bequeathed to us by a group of flawed but hopeful men in a hot closed room in a world very different from ours. We are not now, nor can we ever be a finished product. Alone among all the governing methods we’ve tried since ‘the kingship descended from Heaven in ancient Sumer, democracy doesn’t work that way. It is always open ended. We can always improve it if we believe we can. But to do so, we have to understand far better than I fear most of us do what we were designed to be - that nation in which We the People could together find enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the humility, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to govern ourselves from the bottom up. That is the promise we inherited, and we need to measure our progress by the amount of those traits in our public discourse. It is, in the end, as Lincoln understood, up to us.