The American Dream ?

https://www.cbsnews.com/

news/60-minutesvanity-fair-poll-the-american-dream/
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought widespread changes to the United States and around the world
at record speed, from tragic illnesses and deaths to the quirkiness of social distancing and binge-
watching online shows.After years of low unemployment, the initial economic fallout from the virus
increased jobless claims in the United States by 3,000% in about a month. Now many American
workers and their families cannot reap the fruits of the American Dream. In fact, cracks in the
sterling promises of the American Dream had already been showing up in recent history. Millennials
have come of age hearing they are the first generation in American history who will not do as well as
their parents. That equation of the American Dream with wealth, however, misses a deeper sense of
what the phrase has meant. It has always been about more than just acquisition of material goods.
Enter the COVID pandemic, which provides us an opportunity to rethink the American Dream and to
reclaim the depths of democratic opportunities embedded in it.[…] The phrase itself was coined in
1931 by historian James Truslow Adams. Adams expressed confidence, even at the outset of the
Great Depression, that the traditional American social dynamics for improving one’s station in life
applied to “any and every class.” Adams’ compelling phrase summarized his portrait of America. He
believed that in this land, without the confining impediments of traditional hierarchies, the poor
could rise in station based on their own abilities and hard work. Adams did not acknowledge that
these opportunities mostly went to white Protestants, with the hard work and the losses of non-
whites and non-Protestants contributing to the opportunities of the privileged. Displaced Natives and
enslaved African Americans lived with the cruelest opposite of the American Dream. Their abilities
brought sneers and their hard work rarely won them rewards. The American Dream has sometimes
been supported by withholding opportunities from some people, by immigration restriction or
prejudice, to ensure fulfillment of the dream only for the privileged. In 1964 Malcolm X told a crowd:
“I don’t see any American Dream; I see an American nightmare.”

https://origins.osu.edu/article/american-dream-after-covid-19?language_content_entity=en