Thread by @AmSolidarity

Let's have a thread about what the American Dream means today.

solidarity-party.org/2020/11/20/the…

A lot of you have probably suffered from less contact with family and friends this year during the pandemic, perhaps especially around the holidays.

Millions of Americans are right there with you. But for many of them, isolation is an everyday reality in the best of times,

One pre-election survey on the strength of Americans’ social networks found that nearly one in five Americans (17 percent) reported having no one they were close with, marking a 9 percentage point increase from 2013. Most of this was not due to the pandemic.

Some social scientists even think that the polling errors that were skewed against Donald Trump during the election campaign were due to relatively socially isolated voters (who tended not to respond to surveys) breaking for Trump.

americansurveycenter.org/commentary/cou…

Pollsters found that voters who were more socially isolated tended to pull for Trump even after controlling for other personal characteristics and political attitudes.

americansurveycenter.org/research/socia…

You may also remember that, while many evangelicals voters lean Republican, Trump's strongest support actually came from voters who were less religiously observant even if they identified as evangelicals.

All this is significant. After all, Trump has rightly been portrayed as the symptom of a broken political system. Many of his voters saw him as a middle finger to a system that wasn't working for them.

What isn't working in America today? For millions of people, it's loneliness.

So, uh... what's that got to do with the American Dream, you might ask?

Let us ask you a question: if something very bad happened to you, and you lost your job, or suffered a health crisis, what is keeping you off the street?

If you're fortunate, maybe you have savings to fall back on. Even if you're not, you may expect some kind of government assistance. Or maybe your answer is "nothing."

But for most people, the most important thing you have to fall back on is: other people. Relationships.

Your spouse, your parents or children, extended family, friends, church members, neighbors. People you can depend on.

If you have that, you are wealthy in a way that truly cannot be replaced.

As our VP candidate @AP4ILASP points out in his recent blog post, part of what allows so many immigrants to flourish in this country is precisely this kind of relational richness, which helps people achieve material success.

solidarity-party.org/2020/11/20/the…

Individual initiative matters, of course. But nobody succeeds entirely alone. And more of us will succeed (and not just materially) when we have this rich web of connections (#FamilyFriendsFaith, as Amar likes to say) pulling us up.

Neither of the duopoly parties really get this.

Much of the American Right is still in love with the "up by your bootstraps" narrative that idolizes the innovators individualistic strivers.

This Cadillac commercial sums up that worldview pretty well.

ispot.tv/ad/7BkA/2014-c…

Here's the thing: we may owe a lot to the Steve Jobs types.

But most people are not Steve Jobs. Many of them don't even want to be.

What they want is a decent shot at meaningful work, healthy families, and functional communities.

We need a system that works for those people.

The political left, meanwhile, is usually willing to acknowledge the problems with the "boostraps" approach.

But their vision of success has some major holes in it as well.

Some of you may remember this Obama campaign ad from 2012: "The Life of Julia."

Julia was an everywoman whose life from youth to old age would be improved by all the government programs the Obama administration was promising. The government would make it easier for her get through college, have a child, start a business, save for retirement, and so on.

What's the problem with all this? Well, the weird thing about it is that The Life of Julia doesn't seem to have very many people in it.

We briefly see a mention of her parents, as it relates to insurance coverage. She has one child, whose father is nowhere to be found.

Mostly, the important relationship here is just Julia and Uncle Sam.

So we have a Right that romanticizes individual success to the point that it downplays social relationships and institutions that help make success possible.

We have a Left that thinks government programs can substitute for those relationships.

You may see where the problem is.

Often the American Dream has been defined in terms of upward mobility: the idea that you can get ahead if you are willing to work hard.

Social mobility has been in decline for a while now. So has the kind of social and moral capital we've been describing. Not a coincidence.

Sixty years ago, most Americans were born into two-parents married families, regardless of whether they were rich or poor. Most of them had at least some religious affiliation, regardless of whether they were rich or poor.

Most of them had ties to a neighborhood where they knew neighbors. And so on. We had a shared cultural baseline that softened inequalities and provided a basis for mobility.

Obviously, there were many other social problems then, so we shouldn't overly-romanticize the past. But it remains true that things have changed.

Today, marriage is increasingly a middle-to-upper-class activity. A luxury good, you might say.

This means a huge gap in life-experiences and advantages between different groups of Americans based on class.

Meanwhile, Americans are having fewer children than every before...and importantly, a lot fewer than most of them say they want to have.

Having kids is one of the most important and meaningful things most people will ever do (aside from, you know, keeping the human race going). So this is a major indicator that something is amiss. But we don't always have the political language to talk about it.

There are a lot of complicated factors at work here, both economic and cultural, and each affects the other.

But fundamentally we have a society that *devalues* these crucial relationships, in our culture, in our economy, and in our politics.

This is why we're promoting what we call the Real American Dream.

This vision says that "making it" isn't separable from families and communities. Those relationships build up individuals into the best they can be--and they make individual achievement mean something.

If we have a country that really believes in that Dream, then it will recognize that families and communities shouldn't be erased or replaced by either the market or the state.

Instead, we need a state and a market that serve them first and foremost.