So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him—this, seeker, is the promise of America.
—Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again
In 1931, the historian James Truslow Adams invented one of the most powerful phrases in America's history. In his best-selling history The Epic of America—a sweeping narrative explaining how America's history made it unique among nations—Adams wrote of “The American Dream.” As he wrote:
But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.1
Adams gave a name to what was, in 1931, already a very old idea, one with origins stretching back to before even the foundation of the American republic. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity where anyone with hard work and a little luck can become anything they dream.
The American Dream is America's national narrative and has been for a very long time. It's so embedded into the American psyche that most Americans today believe the American Dream is the heart of what America is supposed to be. It's something uniquely rooted in the culture and history of America, a national story unlike that of any other country on earth. No other nation has a comparable idea of a “national dream”—there's no concept of a Canadian dream or a German dream or a Brazilian dream or an Indian dream. When people around the world think of what makes America different, they think first of the promise of this American Dream.
Yet this powerful belief in an American Dream is something many Americans fear is fading away. It's a national promise that many Americans see as under threat, or even a myth that's long gone. To renew America's parties, we ought to start with this battered national ideal of the American Dream.
THE AMERICAN DREAM
From the very start, America was created around the idea of citizens throwing off the burdens of social class or stigma to pursue new lives without the limits that kept the Old World's inhabitants locked in place. Before America was a nation of immigrants, it was a nation of colonists, many of whom were the Old World's most hated and marginalized people. They bravely set out to build new lives in what was then a harsh wilderness, longing to cast off the chains limiting how they could live, what they must believe, or what they could become. When those colonists rebelled against their king and formed a new republic, they didn't only create a government in which every free man was in theory equal before the law. They encoded the idea of social mobility deep into their new republic—the idea that citizens had the right to pursue not only life and liberty but also their own idea of happiness, without interference from the state, social tradition, or the whims of others. This new government would ban titles of nobility and its chief executive would be no duke or king or consul or emperor but a mere “president,” a title that at the time had the connotation of the simple leader of a meeting.2 From the very beginning, America was created as a nation in which anyone could become anything. In reality, of course, not every American was yet included in this dream—slavery, the non-inclusion of Native Americans, traditional gender roles, and historical divisions excluded many Americans from the full promise of these ideals. Yet America still purposely embedded this dream in the new republic's culture and institutions, at a time when even holding out such ideals was radical compared to the rigid divisions that had reigned across the rest of the world throughout the entirety of human history.
There's no doubt that material prosperity is, and has always been, part of the American Dream. But the American Dream isn't, and has never been, just a dream about a house in the suburbs, a college fund, and a two-car garage—much less a dream of getting rich. The world is full of wealthy nations with broad middle classes. In most of them, talented people can, with a little luck, get rich. Many have liberal democratic governments, and many open their borders to immigrants coming from across the globe looking to build better lives. In none of these countries do we call this access to opportunity or wealth a national dream. That's because the American Dream isn't just about wealth or jobs or the ability to strike it rich but social equality. It isn't a dream about, much less a guarantee of, success. It's a guarantee of a fair chance at success. The American Dream promises every American an equal chance to achieve whatever he or she desires, no matter the circumstance of their birth. Even if you're not born rich or connected. Even if you don't come from the right stock. No matter whether you were born in a poor urban neighborhood, a tiny rural town, or a nameless suburb far from the centers of power. Even if you weren't born in America at all. No matter your religious beliefs, your skin color, or your accent. The government isn't supposed to block your way, and your fellow citizens are supposed to offer you a fair chance to compete and, with luck, prevail. Whatever your dream, and no matter who you are, with enough hard work, ambition, grit, talent, and luck, you're supposed to have a fair shot at achieving anything you want to accomplish in America. Prosperity and economic opportunity are just the most potent byproducts of the American Dream, not its heart.
With time, the American Dream's details have changed with the nation, but this core promise of social equality never has. When James Truslow Adams first wrote of the American Dream, he had in mind the America of immigrants and the frontier. During this era of the American Dream, the frontier promised endless opportunity for settlers without property to achieve independence and prosperity. At the same time, new immigrants continued streaming into the young republic to escape the limitations of their old societies, eager for the fresh opportunities America provided them. The American government opened free land for settlement to any American willing to farm it, so generations of struggling workers from the East could always move west to become the owners of independent family-farming businesses. As new towns sprouted around those new farms, tradespeople and professionals continued to move west out of crowded and competitive cities to open new shops, newspapers, and medical practices. This expanding frontier came at a heavy cost to the Native Americans pushed off their ancestral lands. It also created unprecedented social mobility, allowing poor workers, who in any other place could never have hoped to escape the life into which they were born, to become landowners and businesspeople.
Later, when the nation reached the Pacific Ocean and there was little new land to settle, the American Dream didn't die despite the “closing of the West.” It transformed into the American Dream of the Horatio Alger story, in which a young man could come to America with nothing and rise as high as his hard work and imagination could take him. In this late nineteenth-century version of the dream, a hired laborer could trek to California and strike gold, or a penniless Scottish immigrant like Andrew Carnegie could start life as a telegraph messenger boy and end up with a steel empire. As the nation grew into the modern industrial age, and especially after the Second World War, the American Dream shifted to the modern dream of a stable job, prosperity, and the opportunity for achievement and leisure. It became the postwar dream of a large middle-class home in the suburbs near good schools with two cars in the garage and savings toward retirement. For some, it became the slightly bigger version, the dream of founding a new business or rising to the top of an organizational hierarchy or finding fame and recognition in a chosen profession. America is where a poor kid from Arkansas like Bill Clinton can get himself into Yale Law School and eventually rise to become his nation's president.
We Americans never had a real aristocracy. We don't have a landed nobility and never did. We never believed it necessary that a son should follow the profession of his father. We don't celebrate living an entire life in the town in which you were born. We don't think it noble to give a job to your cousin when a better candidate exists. We like self-made people and distrust the idle children of wealth. We get outraged when a powerful person gets a speeding ticket erased, and we loath the phrase “don't you know who I am.” We work hard to shatter glass ceilings, and we celebrate the people who break them down. We celebrate people who came from nothing to achieve great things—Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, Abraham Lincoln, or Steve Jobs. We know that human nature often works against these beliefs, but we still hold them dearly as key parts of the American character. That's the American Dream. We're supposed to be free people and social equals who each get to define ourselves how we choose. If we work hard and are smart and ambitious, we're supposed to have a fair shot at living the good life no matter where we started. If we're lucky, we can achieve anything.
To keep this promise, several things are supposed to be true in America. First, everyone in America is supposed to get the opportunity to pursue the life they want. Neither your parents nor your community chooses your path, but you do. You can try crazy things no one thinks will work. You can disrupt comfortable systems you think you can improve. Neither the state nor your fellow citizens get to stop you in the name of tradition or stability. No one gets to place arbitrary barriers or classifications in your path. Second, the doors to success in every field in America are supposed to be open to everyone, no matter your background or beliefs. Society is supposed to offer a fair playing field where advancement is based solely on grit and merit. Jobs, promotions, and opportunities aren't supposed to turn on who you are, where you come from, or the influence of your parents. Third, no one in America is supposed to get special treatment based on social identity, wealth, or influence—promotions you didn't earn, privileges others don't get, or exceptions made to rules others have to follow. We aren't all economic equals, but we're supposed to be social equals who all have to wait in the same line at the DMV.
America hasn't always completely kept these promises. Whether it be the Irish, African Americans, rural people, women, Catholics, or Jews, countless groups have at different times found arbitrary barriers erected before their success. The rich and famous have always received some unearned privileges, whether they be elite school admissions, jobs, restaurant tables, or club admittances. Tales abound of American visionaries ignored, inventions stolen, and small operations unfairly strangled by bigger and better-connected rivals. Even though it's never been perfect, it's important that America believes these things ought to be true and that Americans demand their country live up to these beliefs. As a result, America has historically gotten closer to these ideals than any other place on earth at any time in history.
The American Dream is what so many Americans today believe is failing. A mix of changes, events, disruptions, and beliefs have cooperated together to collectively erode Americans' faith in this foundational ideal. The irreversible shift to a postindustrial economy has destroyed large swaths of the settled order in America. Some have found themselves well equipped to take advantage of these disruptive changes to succeed beyond their imaginations. Others have worked hard and doggedly pursued their dreams but found the rules to success changed midstream. At the same time, some groups, such as women, African Americans, and new arrivals, who in the past had unfair barriers placed in front of their dreams, still don't trust America to live up to its promises. Disputes over equity, fairness, culture, and change have left Americans throughout the nation concerned, for different reasons, that the people in charge neither like them nor intend to give them a fair shake. Disruptive change is taking from people what they once had, and few trust they will receive a fair opportunity to get back something better, or even just as good. People don't know who or what to blame. Maybe the problem lies with foreign immigrants taking over good jobs. Maybe it's multinational corporations who don't care about workers. Maybe it's national elites selling out American values. Maybe it's the politicians and K Street lobbyists and big campaign donors selling out the country. Maybe it's just a symptom of America's national decline. Whatever the cause, many have come to believe the American Dream is fading into myth. All these feelings are variations on a theme—a changing world is destroying the promise of the American Dream.
The American Dream is what defines America. The American Dream is what Americans fear is lost. The message of any renewed American party system should revolve around restoring the American Dream. This is the debate America needs to begin, and it's the debate America wants to have. What exactly does the American Dream promise, and how can we ensure America fully lives up to this central vow? What can we do as a people to protect the American Dream, and indeed bolster it? The next great political debate in America, the one that will define the era that's to come, ought to center around this great question: How we can restore, extend, and protect America's sacred promise to its citizens, the American Dream? That's the key to renewing our parties into vibrant engines of government that can keep America strong and prosperous throughout the new age ahead.
REBUILDING PARTIES AROUND THE AMERICAN DREAM
You can't create a viable party just by stringing together a collection of policies you favor, or arbitrarily tossing together voting blocs you like. We're never designing political parties in isolation. We're designing a new party system. We're choosing the terms of the divisions that will separate America into two new coalitions dominating American politics and culture for decades. The issues and concerns we choose to create those new divisions will define the social rifts dividing the American people into two political tribes. They will decide which issues we make national priorities, and which issues we neglect. They will decide which issues become easy to solve, and which solutions become impossible because the people who support them are scattered across political coalitions. Most important, they will create the framework through which we think about our problems. The defining feature of a party system isn't the issues for which each party purports to stand but the great debate it creates. The question isn't which abstract parties you think might better serve America, but what debate, at this moment in our history, is the one America needs to have.
Nearly every major issue worrying Americans today comes back in some way to this question of the American Dream. Workers concerned about the impact of automation and globalization are worried about the decay of the American Dream. Americans worried about rising economic and social inequality are worried about the American Dream. Women, African Americans, new immigrants, and others, who believe unjust barriers stand in their way, believe they're unfairly blocked from pursuing the American Dream. People worried about the impact of mass migration on their jobs and communities are worried about the slipping away of the American Dream. Americans worried about the power of multinational corporations, about the power of new technologies, or about the end of American power and prestige abroad are in different ways worried about the American Dream. Across the nation, Americans with different concerns, living in different communities, based in differing political perspectives, are all worried about the loss of the American Dream. They're afraid it's no longer enough if they work hard and play by the rules. They think there's corruption across the system, giving certain people all the opportunities while people like them don't have a chance. They think power is falling into the hands of people who don't care about them or even like them. They fear their future looks bleak and that things won't get better.
This decline in belief in the American Dream has caused a national breach in trust. Much like the farmers and workers of the Gilded Age who believed they were cheated when the family farm economy imploded but the Rockefellers and Carnegies got rich, Americans who lived their lives according to an implicit social bargain are understandably angry when the terms of that bargain don't seem to have been met. They don't trust America or its institutions because they feel they haven't kept their word. They don't trust politicians to tell the truth. They don't trust those with power to play fair. They don't trust the media. They don't trust corporations not to cheat. They don't trust employers who demand their loyalty to provide them loyalty in return. They don't trust elites not to abuse their status. They don't trust that the rules they follow will be honored by the people who make them, announce them, and guard them. If they work hard and abide by the rules they're told to follow, they end up feeling duped. Reestablishing trust in the American Dream would go a long way toward reestablishing the social trust that has been draining away.
We need a new national debate about how to expand opportunities for everyone. We need to talk about how to clear paths that are unfairly blocked. We need to talk about how we can ensure every American has a fair chance with a level playing field to live whatever life they dream of living, so long as they're willing to work at it and perhaps win a bit of luck. We need to talk about how to ensure everyone has access to the tools, networks, and opportunities they need to have a fair shot at achieving their ambitions. Rebuilding confidence in the American Dream is the most important task and issue America now faces. If we're going to figure out how to ensure that the American Dream remains true in America, we need a national debate to discuss how to protect and extend this dream together.
What America needs right now is some individual, movement, or group of leaders working together to break through politics with a new agenda based around new ideas. It needs leaders wanting to follow in the footsteps of William Jennings Bryan and Franklin Roosevelt. They need to throw away the archaic messages about New Deal liberalism or fighting big government and instead construct a completely different message from scratch. They need to design a new party ideology that can create a new agenda that actually speaks to the problems that keep Americans up at night. Ideally, they need to step up before our existing parties break. Instead of allowing our parties to collapse and waiting to see what new parties emerge from the rubble, they need to spark a party renewal that moves America into its next age without the turmoil and devastation of a traumatic party collapse. America needs someone to refresh our parties with a new agenda and launch this new great debate.
A message built around the American Dream would recognize the fears most Americans share about their future. It would explain what exactly is broken in America and thus propose what must be righted to fix it. Most important, it would provide a framework to build a positive agenda of ideas to make the future better. If our leaders were to embrace the message of the American Dream, they could seize this transition in history and ride through the realignment, yielding two parties stronger and better than they were before. Tossing industrial-era political battles into the past, they could usher in a new era of American political history based around renewal and reform. They could launch a new American party system dedicated to a new national debate over how to preserve and extend the promise of the American Dream. But what specifically does that mean?
THE AMERICAN DREAM AGENDA
The ideology of every political party in America is ultimately an answer to a question. That question is the core of each party system's great debate. The ideologies of the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans offered answers to the question of how we ought to construct a new and untested republic. The ideologies of the Democrats and the Whigs offered answers to the question of how to adapt that republic to the America of the frontier. The ideologies of our Civil War parties offered answers to the question of how to rebuild the republic after a nation-shattering war. The ideologies of the Populist and Progressive Era parties offered an answer to the question of how to address the disruptions and abuses and early industrialization. The ideologies of our New Deal parties also offered answers to a question: How to adapt the institutions of the republic to the realities of a complex and modern industrial economy after a depression and then world war? The Democratic Party answer was New Deal liberalism, harnessing expertise and planning to benefit working people and the least well off. The Republican Party answer was that we could do better by simply allowing the republic's existing institutions to evolve. Our coming Sixth Party System will have to answer a question too.
The American Dream ought to be at the center of our next debate. Our next party system ought to address this question: How do we once more adapt the institutions of our republic, given the changes of the global postindustrial world, to preserve the promise of the American Dream? There are many possible answers to that question, and many possible agendas of reforms that could achieve that goal. One could unite a multitude of different coalitions of people, drawing on an assortment of different principles, each of which offer a different answer to the question of the American Dream. Each such coalition would create a slightly different party ideology, and each could lead to varied proposed agendas. A party built around the American Dream message could in theory even draw on all the same principles—liberty, virtue, populism, and progressivism—as the parties that exist today. It could also even promote many ideas and policies taken from our New Deal era. Both parties have achieved their share of real and lasting policy successes during the industrial era, and many of these policies remain just as relevant now. Depending on the figure, movement, or party that sparked the renewal, an American Dream party could mean very different things.
Different people with different priorities will no doubt disagree about what policies and plans are most urgent for an American Dream Party to pursue, and what problems are most critical to attack. We each might have different preferred allies and certain groups we would rather our coalition oppose. All of that is fine. In fact, we don't ever have to all agree. Right now, all we have to agree on is the problem. If we can agree on America's next great national debate, we can start to build new frameworks. We can start weighing ideas, developing policies, and reaching out to potential allies to someday soon unite half the nation around new ideals. That said, there are nonetheless three things any form of an American Dream party would absolutely have to do.
First, the chief goal of any American Dream party would have to be to update America's institutions for this emerging new America. We built America's institutions for the industrial era of the middle twentieth century. Those institutions rely on the assumption that mid-twentieth-century America is still the reality of America, when that's no longer true. An American Dream party would rethink every American institution, program, and law that was developed for a different time and place, to ensure they make sense in the postindustrial world ahead—creating new programs, abolishing others, updating regulations, and changing national priorities. It would further seek to unleash this national burst of major and often disruptive reform to ensure the reformed institutions support every American having a fair shot at pursuing their dreams. The specifics of the policies the party embraced might be different depending on the specific priorities of the coalition that emerged, but under any version the party would undertake a decades-long mission to refresh the aging institutions of America for the world as it exists today.
Second, any American Dream party would have to assume an affirmative responsibility to help people gain the skills, tools, and opportunities they need to become whatever it is they want to become. The American Dream isn't a guarantee of success or complete equality, but it is a guarantee of social equality and a fair shot at chasing dreams. An American Dream government wouldn't see itself as a guarantor of success but a guardian of opportunity. It wouldn't tell people what dreams to pursue. It also wouldn't just get out of the way, allowing people to chase dreams if they could. As it reformed America's laws and institutions, it would do it with the goal of ensuring that every American has the tools and opportunity to unleash their own potential and achieve success on their own terms. An American Dream party would therefore adapt the philosophy of the old proverb, “If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” Depending on the specifics of the coalition and its priorities, teaching America to fish might mean different things. It might mean not just education but helping people gain access to networks and skills. It might mean helping people acquire capital to start businesses or take risks. It might mean helping people with childcare or medical burdens. It might mean breaking up social, institutional, or government impediments that stop people from following their dreams. What any version of an American Dream party would have in common, however, is it would assume an affirmative responsibility to ensure everyone is socially equal and that everyone has a fair chance to pursue their ambitions, whatever they are and however they define them, regardless of who they are or where they start in life.
Third, any American Dream party would have to prioritize sweeping away the dishonesties and corruption we increasingly take for granted. It would make sure that powerful institutions actually played fair and kept their word. It would work to eliminate grift and graft across society, from government to Wall Street, corporate boards, advertising, law enforcement, and politics. It would seek to ensure that powerful institutions are honest. That they honor their commitments. That they don't cheat their workers or their customers. That they don't use clever spin when they ought to tell the truth. That they don't just honor their narrow legal obligations but also their moral obligations to be fair and loyal. The party would undertake to make certain the entire system works the way it claims to work, in order to shore up the gaping lack in trust that's corrosive to the republic.
Once this new American Dream party formed, America would have its new agenda party. It might build this party around the existing demographic coalitions of our existing party system, or it might instead build a brand new demographic coalition unlike anything we've seen before. It would, however, be a new ideological coalition binding Americans around a new agenda of reform. In response, those who opposed this vision would inevitably come together into a new opposition party. Perhaps they would simply unite to oppose the new agenda party, ensuring its policies are thoughtful and reasoned, stopping utopian overreach, protecting political minorities, and holding the new agenda party accountable. Perhaps instead they would discover their own new agenda to restore the promise of the American Dream, offering America a second alternative to protect and defend America's promise. Then we would have a new great debate.
With the birth of a new Sixth Party System, America would begin a decades-long discussion about how to protect, preserve, and extend the American Dream for years to come. Through that discussion, we would reform our institutions. We would discover new policies. We would surely get some things wrong but other things right. We would respond to a flurry of new technologies, economic disruptions, global events, and disruptive new ideas. Eventually, after years of experiments, debates, and contested elections, we would reach conclusions about what the future of America ought to be. Through it all, we would be discussing the question that most needs addressing: How can we assure that every American has a fair shot at pursuing America's sacred promise, the promise of the American Dream?
Another quote from Thomas Wolfe bears on our present moment:
I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.3
The time for us to accomplish it is now.
THE CHOICE
We stand at another key turning point for America, like the foundation of the republic, the collapse of the Whigs and the outbreak of Civil War, the rise of the populist and progressive reform movements, or the political collapse of the Great Depression and the start of the New Deal. The decisions we make in the coming years will shape America more significantly than we comprehend. As we choose our path, we're not only choosing how the little political battles of our day resolve, but also reshaping the most fundamental divisions of America for decades to come. No one knows for sure what will happen next. What we do know is that we can either stay on our current path and simply let the future happen to us, or else we can embrace the future and shape it for the benefit of us all. We still can choose, renewing our parties rather than seeing them collapse, rebuilding their coalitions around fresh ideas for the future. We can create the debate America needs without the breakdown, disruption, and clashing interests of a party collapse. If we choose it, we can rebuild tomorrow without allowing today to crumble first.
We should take events firmly by the hand and guide America toward the future we prefer. We should take charge of our collective destiny. It's not too late. We should rush forward as Americans, optimistic and resolved with the future in our hands, and renew our parties, renew our politics, and renew once more the United States of America by restoring our nation's greatest promise—the American Dream.