This is Democracy – Episode 26: The American Dream

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>> This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, inter-generational, and inter-sectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy, and this week we have with us one of the foremost scholars of the American dream. Sam Abrams is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and most important for our purposes today he’s done some of the most innovative and thoughtful research on how Americans are defining and redefining what the American dream means to us today. Sam, thank you for joining us.

Sam: Thanks for having me.

Suri: Before we turn to Sam and his really outstanding article in the New York Times and a larger study he’s done on the topic, we have of course an original poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem today?

Zachary: After the Dreams.

Suri: After the Dreams. Well let’s hear it.

Zachary: Waking up to NPR on the radio mix in with the patter of the rain. Breakfast fast, cereal floating in milk lakes of cold kitchen counters. Pushing out the door into the frost. Late in crowded car drop-off lines. Slick highways heading downtown. Getting gas and a burnt cup of coffee. Smiling at the rain clouds as you stare up, and late to work you still dance to the radio down the frontage roads into the center of a thousand cities. And we all know the way the cold offices stare. The bland rugs under long lights. Ah, but we recall the feeling of a job done well. The soft music through the headphones breaking the silence of the office. And the pats on the back, the high-fives down the hallway. We all sing the same song between the rolling chairs, the copy machines, and the bathroom anniversaries. We know the meditation of being alone in the car with the hum of the highway. Carpool lines among the countless vehicles. But the joy of the mud-cape kids that jump into the backseat. The hugs, the endless questions home along the commute. Homework slogs, dinner hot off the stove, television laughs in the couch before bed, and ending everyday with the knowledge that after the dreams of tonight we will awaken to a good tomorrow.

Suri: Wow. What is your poem about, Zachary?

Zachary: Well my poem was really about ordinary people and how their dreams aren’t to become super rich or famous. They want just to find joy in small things in life, and they find happiness in normal routine, and seeing their kids, and watching nature.

Suri: And why is that hard for people to do?

Zachary: Well I think it’s hard for people to grasp who don’t feel that way because we think that dreams, “Oh. You have to reach beyond your means”, but many people in America find hope and excitement in everything around them.

Suri: That’s great. That’s great. Well Sam I think this connects very well to your recent study. What is at the root of your efforts to understand the American dream? What are you trying to get at in this exciting work?

Sam: Well actually, Zachary’s fantastic poem is exactly what we were trying to get at (laughs) in looking this up. A number of years ago I actually taught a course called “The American Dream”, and the reason I taught it was for the similar set of reasons and issues that Zachary’s poem introduced, and that is we live in a world where we have Instagram and we know some of the really dangerous negative effects of that where on one hand everything is staged and everyone around us is trying to project an ideal life. How do we deal with that today? On the other hand we hear people like David Foster Wallace writing wonderful pieces like “This is Water” where he talks about finding joy and comfort in the day-to-day lives of individuals where you can find peace and comfort just by shopping and walking through a parking lot with a squeaky wheeled shopping cart; you can find bliss in that.

So we talked about the American dream in these sort of abstract ways, and then we have our politicians constantly talking about the dream. Sometimes some of them are saying it’s dead, it’s buried. People forget that actually Donald Trump launched his campaign by saying the American dream is dead, we need to do something about that, let’s make America great again. I wish he didn’t necessarily say that but he invoked that. And then we have historians and writers who have been thinking about what does it mean to be American and what does the American dream really mean. James Adams is often credited in the 1830’s of coming up with the term first, but it’s in fiction all the time. I love assigning “The Great Gatsby” to students because the American dream is latent in that as well.

So these concepts are flying around, they’re all over the place, and as an empirical social scientist I said, “Maybe we can get a better handle on that if we actually ask people in a very straightforward way and give them some choices. Not just say ‘are you able to achieve the American dream or not’, or not just say ‘is the American dream dead or not’.” Not prescribe them a definition of the American dream explicitly where we’re saying, you know, “The American dream, the idea of making more money, is that happening or not?” What if we ask it a little differently? What if we ask it in the most intellectually open way we can and see what we find? And that’s what we present in the report.

Suri: That’s fantastic, Sam. And we should tell people of course the report is available through AI, is that correct?

Sam: That is correct.

Suri: Sam, do you have a sense that the American dream, the way people think about it, is this an obsession that recurs with every generation? Or are there moments like our own now where we not only fret about perhaps the end of the American dream, but also talk about it more. Does this vary over time?

Sam: So I would say I’m the political scientist, you’re the historian so I actually point to historians on this and I really appreciate that they’ve studied this. From what I can tell from reading dozens upon dozens of books about this, it’s a generational issue. Every generation thinks about it, every generation wants to reinvent itself, and every generation comes up with a slightly different version of what does it mean to achieve and seek it, but it does seem to be an unusual narrative that is fairly specific to the United States versus other countries. And again James Adams talks about this where if you go to places like Europe or places like Asia they have centuries if not millennia old tradition. There are preexisting social structures. We don’t have those structures here in the United States. The whole point is we had much more of a blank slate. Yes we were colonized by various powers but we rejected those and tried to come to up with something new, and that idea of something new is that dream and we have to renegotiate with ourselves what it actually means every couple of years.

Suri: And so this gets right at the heart of your work. What do you see people defining as the American dream today? How does your study reveal a deeper understanding?

Sam: Sure. So what we did was rather than prescribe what we think it means as so many studies do and so many snap polls do, we basically said, “Look, we talk about the American dream constantly and we’re going to give you a list of eight different items that we have identified as being things people talk about when they associate or think about the American dream. Things from to own a home, to have a successful career, to have a better quality of life than your parents.” Incidentally, that was how I was raised.

I was raised in a middle class area in Philadelphia; it was very middle class, very blue collar. We lived in row homes, it was a very tight knit Italian, Irish, and Jewish community, and growing up I would hear from everybody, “Well the idea is better than we did and get up, get out, move to a single family home in the suburbs.” We also had questions like do you become wealthy? Do you have the freedom to live one’s life as you so choose? So rather than prescribing it, we came up with a list based on historical record and based on how we, and what we see in the media and in sort of the zeitgeist today. Various ways of thinking about it. Politicians regularly invoke the idea of money. Julian Castro the other day mentioned something about upward mobility and money. Robert Reich the other day mentioned the American dream vis-à-vis money. Maya Lin, the sculptor, on the other hand said just about a year ago the American dream is all about living your life as you so choose…

Suri: Right.

Sam: …which I appreciated seeing.  So people keep talking about it and we said, “Let’s just ask them.” So we presented people with this list of eight things and we just asked, “Looking at all these eight items, how would you rank it in terms of being essential, or less essential, or not important at all in achieving the American dream?” So you could go down the list, you could say all of these things are essential or none of them are essential. You can say two of them are very important and the rest are not. So we kept it very open with a deliberate mindset to say we really want to probe people effectively and carefully. And the numbers were shocking and very, very important because the least important of the eight was to become wealthy actually. Only 16% of Americans said that becoming wealthy was essential to the American dream. And then on the idea that I had growing up, a better quality of life than one’s parents, only about 45% of Americans thought that that was essential. Twice that is what we have for the top answer and that is to have the freedom of choice in how to lives one’s life. And then 83% said to have a good family and personal life. So the numbers are very clear and very, very powerful here, and that is that some of these earlier conceptions that I was raised with an earlier generation have faded away and there’s this very different individualistic and family and friend-centric world view that now comprises the American dream. It’s been…

Suri: Did this surprise you, Sam? I’m sorry.

Sam: Absolutely. Absolutely, because, again, so many people talked about monetary backgrounds and it has nothing to do with that. Let me rephrase, it has little to do with that. Money still matters but not nearly as much. What’s interesting is when you break it down– So I actually said let me run this and look at people who are wealthy versus a lot less wealthy and see if there’s much of a difference here. The answer was no. They just didn’t diverge even though I expected that to possibly show up.

Suri. Hmm. And what do you take as the implication of that?

Sam: Well the implication is that when you ask people, “Are we living the American dream? Are you on your way to achieve it, or is it just not possible?” about 80 to 82% of Americans say they’re either living the dream or are on the way to achieving it. Quite optimistic. And again, it’s remarkably consistent. One story that we always hear about is that the coasts are blooming and there are a few spots, you know, in flyover country, and I hate using that word but that’s what so many people like to say. But in the heartland of America, these people are suffering, they’re not realizing the American dream. When you break it apart we’re not seeing these differences at all. So what I take from this is that it would be good to share this narrative and remind America that despite the frustrations that people are having now, despite the negativity, despite the political class and the chatter of negativity, and seeming culture war that we may have it’s not as bad, and we may want to remind ourselves that we’re all still able to, most of us are able to live our lives the way we want. It’s a value that all Americans seem to, you know, embrace, and, you know, we could use a good kick in the pants to remind ourselves that things are not as bad.

Suri: Sam, I love the kick in the pants and I love the optimism. We do have a couple of somewhat skeptical questions from students so let’s turn to Edson Santos.

Edson: A lot of people argue that the American dream is unattainable because not everybody has access to the resources necessary to achieve it. How would you respond to a critic that asks if the American dream is available to all Americans?

Sam: Sure. So based on the way we have… You know, based on what we have uncovered, the idea that the dream is contingent on being able to live your life freely, it is available to everyone. I can think of very few cases where you wake up in the morning and you can’t make choices. Americans have the ability to make choices. They are not always going to be the same set of choices, but we have that ability to say “I’m going to do something, choice A or choice B” in any given day. As for access and opportunity, which I think is at the heart of this, that is obviously a very important issue that we need to work on but in terms of making sure that everyone has access to these opportunities. But as for the dream itself, it’s a choice to get up in the morning and do you try to take classes, do you try to get a degree or not. Generation after generation has the ability to choose what they do in the morning and then chose what they do throughout the day, and the data makes it pretty clear that that’s what the dream is about.

Suri: Is it possible, Sam, that people might be responding that they’re living the American dream but not always feeling that at the same time.

Sam: I think it’s not only possible but very, very likely. We are social creatures and one of the things that’s come out in the last two years is that the trauma people are facing by the government instability, the regular threats of government shutdowns, the negativity that we see in our political system– My students are regularly complaining, and rightfully so, about feeling overwhelmed, having a sense of depression, and just feeling unstable.

Suri: Right.

Sam: And I don’t blame them. It’s a pretty unpleasant world right now. So, again, my optimism was to try to remind ourselves– or my hope was that the optimism in the data would remind ourselves that things are, you know, we may be feeling one set of things, but it’s not necessarily true.

Suri: Right.

Sam: Just because we see certain things, or just because we hear certain narratives in the media and around us doesn’t make it true, it just means that it’s the dominant narrative in the media at any moment in time. And one of the things I’ve tried to do taking a look at your playbook as a historian is to remind ourselves that history matters.

Suri: Mm-hmm.

Sam: And that we need to anchor our current epoch in larger historical narrative. Regularly students say “This is the most dysfunctional Congress ever and the most corrupt set of officials ever. Can you believe what’s going on with various cabinet officials?” And I’ll then say let’s talk about the Teapot Dome scandal.

Suri: Right.

Sam: (laughs) Let’s talk about dozens of other moments in history. So I think your point is completely correct, people are frustrated. People may not feel it but it’s our job as teachers, and this is where publicly minded historians and public interest history like what you’re doing and a number of others are doing is so darn important. We need that context. We’re not operating in a vacuum, but our education system unfortunately I think has deprived so many of the millennial generation, and generation z, and even gen x’s of this important history. We just don’t have the context, so I think we internalize things in a fairly negative way. So getting this history out and reminding ourselves it may be frustrating but let’s think about it, you know, Richard Nixon. Things that were pretty darn bad then and we can go back in the historical record even further.

Suri: Right. Right. Well I think leaders also have an obligation to play and to fulfill in this. Franklin Roosevelt is the model of creating hope by contextualizing the world that we’re in.

Sam: And leadership. And I actually also teach a course on leadership and I couldn’t agree more that we’re having a leadership vacuum.

Suri: Yeah.

Sam: Where, you know, it’s hard to turn on any form of media and find a leader that’s saying the positive things on both sides of the aisle, and it’s hard to find someone trying to grab the mantle of leadership. If you look at both parties it looks like both of them are scrambling for messaging ideas-

Suri: Right. Right.

Sam: -and organizational coherence, and that’s another problem that I think is definitely feeding into the anxiety that so many Americans face right now.

Zachary: Did you see any difference in the data between classes and– Did wealthier people tend to feel more like they’d achieved the American dream than less wealthy individuals? Did people think they had to be wealthy but was there a difference in the data?

Sam: Yes, there was a difference in the data, but it was not huge. The first difference was that I asked two positive categories and one negative category. The positive is your family is living the American dream or your family is on your way to achieving it. So if you were wealthier you are more likely to say you are living it. If you were less wealthy you were still likely to have a positive response you are just far more likely to say you’re on your way to achieving it. So that was the first part, and then the second part was there was a four or five point difference between those who were making over $100,000, they were about four/five points more optimistic than those who made under $35,000 on the overall optimism score. That’s considering everything. Not a very large difference at all.

Suri: Right.

Sam: And statistically, it’s basically the same. We had very large samples. A few points, you know, four to five points is not considered major differences when you’re looking at hundreds and thousands of people. So no, the answer was– So yes, let me step back, yes there was a difference. It was not huge or particularly statistically significant.

Suri: Right, so one of the takeaways, Sam, would be that wealth helps but wealth is not necessary.

Sam: Exactly, and that’s why it was such a profound thing. It’s good to have it, you know, but with more money, you know this has adage with a lot– when you have more money you have more problems. Your life expands and gets more complicated, and just because one is wealthier doesn’t mean problems aren’t real. In many business school classes, we read about various people who are every wealthy who struggle for their own set of reasons.

Suri: Sure.

Sam: So the struggle, the frustration, the world view, and mental health issues from that are consistent; doesn’t matter how rich you are or how poor you are.

Suri: Right.

Sam: So the idea, again, is that this idea of individualism transcending all of these cleavages is very powerful.

Suri: So we have one more student question, and this one will take us back where you started, Sam, in social media. This is from Allison Pierce.

Allison: How has social media played a part in the idea of obtaining the American dream? Has it made it easier or more difficult? Also, has it impacted everyone or just made a difference of those who have easy access to technology?

Sam: The access question… it’s hard for me to answer that. There are still many communities that are not served particularly well by social media and infrastructure, such as broadband lines, to enable quick access to these sorts of things. I don’t have an answer for that part. As for has it made things better or worse, I think unfortunately in this case it’s made things pretty bad. People are always comparing themselves, people are always curating their image. I think it’s not particularly healthy when people spend most of their time curating what they put up online. I am certainly one who falls to victim. My Instagram makes me look like everything is coming up roses, whether it is or isn’t, and I think that has a cumulative effect that can bother people after a while. People look at everyone else and go, “How do people have the time to do this? Where does the money come from to live this sort of life?” So I think that definitely creates a sense of depression and anxiety. Does that affect the American dream? Hard to say. I do worry that there are these just effects that promote materialism, and that part of the American dream is what worries me. There are there these concerns that it’s all about goods and travel and things like that rather than necessarily individual meaningful outcomes, as Zachary’s poem talks about, where you can take pleasure in the day-to-day routine, and the mundane which is, again according to David Foster Wallace, sacred. So I worry that there’s too much noise that actually distracts us from being with ourselves to realize things are okay.

Suri: Yeah, that was my–

Sam: That’s just speculation.

Suri: That was my take away, Sam, from your work, which was that in a sense we’re talking about the wrong things. We’re talking about the things that aren’t really important to people, but we keep talking about them because they keep getting thrown in front of our faces.

Sam: Yes. As someone who has a little boy, yes I was very lucky to pick up a really cool little piece of art for his room, but that’s meaningless. Yesterday when he wasn’t feeling so great, for a minute when he felt better, he just was lying down on the bed with me and he stared right into my eyes and just started smiling for a good ten minutes. That was the most meaningful thing you can have, it had nothing to do with materialism. I worry that because we’re spending our days trying to curate every experience– I think about when I first started dating years, and years, and years ago, I didn’t have a cellphone, I wouldn’t take photos of food, and if I went to a nice restaurant I’d be present. Now, I do this and I’m embarrassed to do it. If a dish comes out and it looks kind of cool, I take a picture of it. I might even post it. I try not to do it anymore because I realize it’s not necessarily a healthy thing, but, you know, the social media has changed a lot about how we see the world, and it has changed the way we present and in some cases behave. There was an article just the other day that mentioned that people are now choosing vacation choices because they’ve seen something on Instagram, and it looks like it would make for a cool picture of them to be in front of.

Suri: Right.

Sam: That scares me a lot.

Suri: Yeah. We joke in our family about us seeing people who spend their entire time visiting places with their back to the site so they can have a nice selfie. Don’t even see the monument. So Sam, as you know, we like to close every one of our discussions with a final thought on the positive things that we can all do, the ways in which we can take this historical and social science knowledge and improve our democracy. What’s your takeaway for listeners on that?

Sam: So one of the other pieces of the survey was about the national versus the local, and one of the findings was, and I found this very appealing because it fits into the American dream narrative, is that if you ask Americans, “Are you happy with the direction of the country? Are you happy with where things are going?” The answer’s overwhelmingly mo. If you ask, however, “Are you happy with how things are going in your local community?” The answer is overwhelmingly yes. I spent some time in Austin, it has a great vibe. A lot of people know that, that’s why people flock to it. If you spend a lot of time in Austin and ignore the craziness (laughs) in the east coast, you know, a lead quarter from New York to Boston to Washington and just focus on what you’re doing locally, you realize there’s a lot of great stuff going on.

Suri: Right.

Sam: And you know, my positive thought would be try to tune out some of the chatter. Try to tune out some of the negativity, that noise. And focus on your friends, your family, and what’s going on actually around you. Put your phone down. Listen to what’s going on, have a conversation. Don’t take a picture like I do of food and post it.

Suri: (laughs)

Sam: No one cares and no one really wants to see it. When we ask about the American dream, it’s very clear that people care about being able to wake up in the morning and live their lives the way they want to, and it’s very important for Americans to spend time with friends and family. We should try to do that a little more often. Tune out, again, the national chatter a little more, and people may start realizing that they are living the dream, and that’s something people still flock to this country to do because there’s that freedom to do that without the previous history and the baggage that comes with it.

Suri: Right. Zachary do you think that’s possible? Will young people be able to do that?

Zachary: Yes, I do think so. I actually think that a lot of young people today are starting to see the problems with social media. No one of my generation thinks social media is perfect. No one thinks it’s completely detrimental. I think that we also need to have more education on how to use the internet and social media properly in a way that is healthy and a learning experience, and I think with that it’s very possible.

Suri: That’s great. Well Sam, thank you so much. You and Zachary this morning have really enlightened us about some of the core elements of the American dream, how it’s evolved over time, and the importance of individualism and good social science research. So thank you for joining us.

Sam: Thanks so much for having me.

Suri: And thank you everyone for working on the American dream, keeping it alive, and helping to improve our society. This is Democracy.

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>> This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com

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