...

As much as the idea of national exceptionalism should be combatted, the United States remains a peculiar and exceptional country. No other country invests as much into modern myth-making and ideology as the United States. Nobody speaks of an “Australian Dream” or a “Welsh Dream” (excepting perhaps the dream of a sovereign and independent Wales). In the United States, however, the “American Dream” constitutes a vital core of the myth the country drapes itself with.

The origin of the dream comes back to the petty bourgeois, or small capitalist, nature of American society in colonization. For those who came to the colonies not indentured or enslaved, there was a real opportunity or possibility. By conquest and “originary accumulation” tracts of land and natural resources might allow an artisan and a farmer the ability to cultivate a living. The dream amounted to a selective promise that there were enough resources and space to carve out a thriving livelihood.

We are, however, no longer living in that period. Even the agrarian reforms promised by Reconstruction never panned out, and the homesteading that might have allowed for reparations for the formerly enslaved has passed away. Trying to become an artisan, whether self-employed or the owner of a small business employing a handful, is a difficult dream to have. The forces of a money society which enticed the dream in the first place, hundreds of years ago, now make it nearly impossible to realize and difficult even to entertain. The American Dream had to shift. Instead of owning a workshop or farm, the dream shifted into professionhood and suburban life. The dream involved job security, a mortgage, and calcifying cisheteronormative gender norms.

That dream is itself a thing of the past, also. The necromancers who wish to resurrect it do so in the wish for a fascistic revival of a past that never really existed, or when it did, was in truth a nightmare. A dream of a housewife is the nightmare of diagnoses of hysteria. The dream of a house is the nightmare of foreclosure. The dream of a profession is the nightmare of a bullshit job. Today the American Dream is nothing more than the promise of empty promises.