A recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll contained some disturbing data about public attitudes toward the American dream.
Forty-six percent of respondents answered the American dream once was true but not anymore; 23 percent said it never was true. This 70 percent who think the American dream is dead is the highest in nearly 15 years of surveys. And that pessimism knew no demographic boundaries: Men and women, older and younger adults all believed the future was bleak.
Axios CEO Jim VandeHei writes that the lack of faith in the American dream is a “crisis far bigger than politics.”
One oft-cited reason is the economic pessimism that has gripped the country. The same Wall Street Journal-NORC poll that showed a dying American dream found 56 percent saying the nation’s economy was “poor,” 45 percent believing economic conditions will worsen in the coming months and 59 percent doubting the ability of the country’s leaders to solve our economic problems.
Back in 1992, James Carville coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Ever since, Carville’s aphorism has become an axiom of politics: Good economic conditions mean incumbents win; bad ones insure defeat.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn that followed ousted President Trump from the White House.
In 2024, high inflation, coupled with significant job losses, put Trump back into the White House.
Trump understood the economic pain people were suffering and promised on “Day One” that he would “immediately bring prices down.”
That did not happen. Instead, some economists are forecasting both higher prices and more unemployment. Americans have not faced those conditions since the days of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
No wonder so many Americans agreed with candidate Donald Trump who said in 2024, “The American dream is dead.” Trump promised voters he would restore it to new life.
Americans don’t believe it.
Yet linking a poor economy to a lack of faith in the American dream goes against the grain of history.
The term “American dream” is a relatively recent one. It gained widespread popularity after the publication of historian James Truslow Adams’s book, “The Epic of America,” whose working title was “The American Dream.”
Adams rejected the idea that the American dream was about “motor cars and high wages.” Instead, he defined its core as a social order in which everyone could attain “the fullest stature” to which he or she is capable.
What makes Adams’s book so timely is that he published it in 1931 during the Great Depression when economic fears were rampant, the stock market had collapsed, the ineffectual Herbert Hoover was president and the nation’s very survival seemed very much in doubt.
Yet even amid the Great Depression, Americans held out hope that better times were ahead. Fifty percent expected general business conditions would eventually improve, and 60 percent thought that opportunities for getting ahead were either better or at least as good as in their father’s day.
The public’s faith in the American dream was affirmed by their presidents. In 1972, Richard Nixon reiterated his belief in the American dream telling voters, “We believe in it because we have seen it come true in our own lives.”
In 2016, Barack Obama not only reaffirmed his faith in the American dream, but applied it universally saying, “The American dream is something no wall will ever contain.”
Today, what is fundamentally undermining our collective faith in the American dream is not the poor economic conditions that beset our country but a lack of faith in our institutions of government.
The Gallup Poll finds sharp declines in public confidence in the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court. Other instruments of government have also suffered major losses, including the criminal justice system, higher institutions of education and public schools.
Nongovernmental institutions have also experienced declines in the public trust: religious denominations, banks, newspapers, television news and big business all report a lack of public faith in their efficacy.
Even more disturbingly, Americans trust one another less than they did a decade ago.
Adams wrote that the American dream was the glue that kept the country together. However, if it ever should fail, he warned that such a collapse would result in “the failure of self-government, the failure of the common man to rise to full stature, the failure of all that the American dream has held of hope and promise for mankind.”
We are in a perilous moment. If the bonds of the American dream that made the United States into something more than an identifiable geographical area on a map are loosened, and faith in the American dream’s promise of a better life are lost, then the very essence of our nation will be forever changed.
John Kenneth White is a professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America. His latest book is titled “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”