Musings on the American Dream

I don’t know when it started, but I recently realized a concept that disturbed me:

I have grown to utterly hate the phrase “The American Dream.”

I’m hardly the only one who feels this way. I have had many a smug European tourist or exchange student lecture me on how the concept “enables [your] worst excesses,” “shows [your] utter arrogance,” and other phrases they quoted verbatim from the writings of some American Marxist. So, to clarify, I’d like to explain the concept, the way I’ve always understood it.

The American Dream simply referred to the idea that, as the USA was a nation without aristocracy or caste, a man had the possibility of social mobility and achievement, as long as he had the ability to do so and the willingness to labor for it. That is all the concept is-note there is nothing about “Keeping Up With the Joneses,” nor is there anything about being entitled to anything.

Indeed, the concept of social mobility has become rather ubiquitous in liberal democracies around the world. A shame, considering that, as well as the decline of aristocracy made America legitimately unique. Thus, one would have assumed the phrase would have quietly died a dignified death like the many other philosophical concepts that have run their course.

But, like normal cell growth metastasizing and becoming cancerous cell growth, the “American Dream” lives on, after having long out-lived its course. As much as I hate to say it, the Europeans are right about it as it is today — a nation in which venal, hustling bastards with no skill beyond being venal, hustling bastards can become exorbitantly wealthy and famous is not a nation worthy of respect. Whether I am referring to reality television stars or social justice hucksters is up for you to decide. Nevertheless, America now embodies a loathsome version of this entire concept.

More damningly, the Dream is used to justify any aspect of social engineering that the powers that be want to push.

“We need to use the United States as a dumping ground for the rest of the world because it’s not like there’s anything worthwhile there,” you can hear them say. “It’s just a big economic zone!”

They will then continue, “besides, the American Dream is for people that aren’t American citizens! They’re Americans-to-be!”

It seems quite obvious to me why the endless push for more and more amnesty for illegal immigrants is referred to as the “DREAM Act,” and those seeking to exploit it are always referred to as “DREAMers,” in order to evoke warm, and fuzzy feelings relating them to “the American Dream.”

But is it so much of a stretch to assume that the media may very well push transsexuals as the latest group of “poor, tired, and hungry yearning to breathe free?”

Considering how the Republican Party immediately prostrated itself before Bruce Jenner’s feet, and is rattling its saber at Russia specifically because of their anti-LGBT policies, we may already be at that point.

This is all part of how the idea of equality of opportunity, or “leveling the playing field,” has long since become the idea of “force everybody to have equal results at all costs,” because, well, all men are created equal. And naturally, this concept is always wrapped in the “helping people achieve their American Dream” rhetoric.

In other words: the idea is that the history and culture of the United States is nothing but a loathsome, repugnant black stain upon the Earth, and completely unique in its wrongdoing. They seem to act as if the United States is literally the only country in history founded by one group of people conquering another group of people. It seems they even act as if America is also the only country to have slavery at some point in its history. But the only saving grace of this country is the body of ideals that govern it, which must be constantly referred to at all times. For, you see, the United States has an obligation to be the world’s dumping ground. Because only that way can it atone for its sins. 

Admittedly, racial and ethnic prejudice in the United States certainly existed, and made society unequal to an extent, but even the likes of Alexis de Tocqueville and other foreign visitors noted how prevalent the ideals of equality were in pre-Civil War America, and how the elected officials actually did what the people wanted, favorably comparing the United States to his own European experience — much of which was still under autocracy. Needless to say, many of the habits of American culture and politics that de Tocqueville praises have since deteriorated.

I have long argued that, had the Founding Fathers replaced “all men are created equal” with an explicit declaration of “all men are equal under the law,” a lot of the “keeping up with the Joneses” nonsense that this culture produces would be eliminated. But, their failure to clarify that concept is, in my opinion, a reason why all of the left-wing nonsense of the modern world comes from the United States and its intersectionality, as well as the “Oppression Olympics.” Of course, it centers around the fact that some minority groups are less financially and scholastically successful than the white majority, and therefore, we have to force them to be equal because of the American Dream. The fact that some minority groups are in fact more successful than the white majority in every conceivable metric is conveniently brushed under the rug.

And then there’s fat acceptance, which is essentially a movement that wants to make it illegal to tell fat people that they’re overweight, aided by complete ignorance of nutrition. Needless to say, this came from America as well, because true equality can only exist when everybody is walking around within metaphorical “anti-common sense force fields,” and nobody is allowed to criticize anybody else.

To clarify for the obtuse: I am not saying people shouldn’t have the right to shred their genitalia, eat big handfuls of lard, or whine about whatever exaggerated historical trauma you can imagine. In fact, if a man wished to, for example, become a woman, and decided to live quietly and not “do it in the street and scare the horses,” and that’s their greatest desire, then more power to them. In fact, that’s a more respectable interpretation of the “American Dream” than any of the cisgendered television twats gallivanting across the screen, racing to see who can destroy civilization the fastest.

Meanwhile, the wages of America stagnate, the nation is driven into deeper and deeper debt each year, and social mobility is lower than it has ever been.

So that’s the American Dream as it is today: completely dump on the citizens of the United States, turn the nation into just a big economic zone that is literally being sold off to the highest bidder, all the while militarily enforcing progressivism throughout the world. Now the dream can flourish like never before!

The concept of the American Dream has clearly run its course. And when something no longer works, it’s time to throw it out. I say to hell with it.

This article was originally posted on The Barbaric Gentleman