The American Dream is now very sick and perhaps even on the verge of death. The Age of Trump and authoritarian populism are closely related to this in several ways.
The imperiled American Dream helped to fuel the righteous rage at the elites and a broken economic and political system that lifted Donald Trump back to the White House. If Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans and the larger right-wing antidemocracy movement achieve their goals — even partially so — of gutting the social safety net, hollowing out the federal workforce and enacting tax and other spending and budgetary policies that siphon off even more of the American people’s money and give it to the richest individuals and corporations, the American Dream will be even more out of reach. Public opinion polls and other research have consistently shown that a large percentage, if not the majority, of Americans believe that the American Dream is something in the past and that present and future generations will have a much more difficult life economically than previous generations.
Homeownership and “living in a good neighborhood” are central to the reality and cultural mythology of the American Dream. As the United States becomes more economically stratified and the richest 10 percent now own a disproportionately large percentage of the country’s wealth (60 percent), home ownership has become increasingly difficult for the average American to achieve. The rental market reflects this pressure. In many parts of the country, a combination of financial speculators and multinational corporations is buying up entire neighborhoods and communities, forcing out existing residents and then pricing the properties so that they are generally only accessible to affluent people.
America’s political polarization reflects these divides of who can enjoy the freedom and right of social mobility through moving from one home and neighborhood (or part of the country) to a more desirable one and those who are stuck, often intergenerationally, in the same homes and neighborhoods of their birth. Political scientists have shown that people who moved more than one hundred miles from their hometown were more likely to vote for Democrats. Those Americans who remain close to their places of birth were much more likely to vote for Donald Trump.
To better understand the connections between the idea of home, the American Dream, social mobility, and America’s increasingly fractured politics and larger society, I recently spoke with Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor at The Atlantic and the author of the new book “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.”
Given everything transpiring here in America with Trump’s second term, how are you feeling?
I have the rare privilege of doing work that grows more meaningful during times of tragedy or uncertainty. So, for my own part, I turn to the craft of journalism — working on stories that can help bring clarity, put new facts on the record and pursue accountability. And that’s really the best advice I have to offer others, too. If things are unfolding that concern you, find your own small way to make the world a little better. You won’t solve everything, but you may solve something.
What is the American Dream? The American Dream and how a person feels relative to it — and the ability to attain it — is central to the rise of Trumpism and authoritarian populism and the rage at the elites.
The best definition of the American Dream I’ve ever encountered came from one of the founders of The Atlantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He recalled kids in a schoolyard saying defiantly: I’m as good as you be.
That’s it. That’s the dream. A country in which each of us is accorded equal dignity, equal rights, and equal opportunity. We can measure its realization in our own lives in a variety of ways, and often we tend to do so in terms of material goods. But those are just yardsticks. When people look around and see that the Dream has been denied to themselves or their neighbors, that’s what they’re getting at, the denial of the dignity of equality.
What does “home” mean relative to the American Dream? “Home” and the American Dream and neighborhood and community are central to how people think about society and politics.
One of the biggest things I discovered while writing “Stuck” was just how often people used to move. At the peak, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably one out of every three Americans moved each year. As late as 1970, it was one in five. And it’s been sliding for 50 years. We just got new numbers, and it’s down to one in thirteen, an all-time low. I actually think that’s a big problem! But for counterintuitive reasons. I think the lack of mobility is gutting our communities.
“Many people in working-class communities can see, very clearly, that something has broken in American life, that they don’t have the opportunities they expected. Unfortunately, demagogic politicians have also spotted that justified sense of grievance and exploited the rise of zero-sum thinking to set workers against each other.”
The peaks of American mobility coincided with the peaks of community. At a broad level, the constant infusion of new arrivals energized civic life. And at an individual level, when you move someplace new, you have to seek out new friends, join new groups, and develop new habits. What historically made American communities special is that, to an unusual extent, our identities weren’t inherited but chosen. Because we had the option to leave, the choice to stay became active — to remain in a town, a church, a club. It’s why American civic life was long so remarkably robust, why the pews were filled on Sunday. And as we’ve stopped moving around, it’s decayed very sharply.
How many Americas are there? We are not one nation or people.
We put the answer right on the dollar bill: E pluribus, unum. We’re many, and we’re one. The book talks about the difference between Israel Zangwill, who exalted the “melting pot” as the ideal, and Horace Kallen, who coined the term “pluralism” as an alternative. I think Kallen had the better of the argument. It doesn’t make you or me any less American to also embrace our other identities or to be fully part of our particular communities. The idea that diversity could be a strength was a pretty radical claim when Kallen made it a century ago, but over time, I think it’s been proved correct.
Many of the majority white “red state” and “downscale” “working class” communities that have flocked to Trumpism are not that dissimilar in terms of poverty, lack of upward mobility, limited opportunities, being hurt by globalization/neoliberalism/casino capitalism and other forces as compared to majority Black and brown communities. This is an important fact that is not commented upon enough in the dominant narrative that Trumpism is primarily about an aggrieved “working class.”
One thing that blue-collar communities share across the country—whether in rural areas or inner cities — is that their residents have lost their mobility. The freedom to move toward opportunity used to be an American birthright. Its revocation is experienced not just as a loss of income but as a loss of dignity and a loss of hope.
When people lose the chance to move where they want, the research says they grow more cynical, more alienated, and more inclined to see the world as a zero-sum game, where others’ gains come at their expense. I think many people in working-class communities can see, very clearly, that something has broken in American life, that they don’t have the opportunities they expected. Unfortunately, demagogic politicians have also spotted that justified sense of grievance and exploited the rise of zero-sum thinking to set workers against each other—an effective way to win elections, but not to improve the lives of voters.
America is race and class segregated. By some measures, America is as, if not more, segregated than it was in the 1950s. That segregation reflects and fuels the United States’ extreme political polarization and negative partisanship. We do not live near people who are different from us, and therefore we don’t see each other as real human beings. This is fuel for malign political and social actors.
This is, sadly, all too correct. After a long period in which Americans fought incredibly hard to enlarge the freedom to move, tearing down barriers of class and race, we’ve spent the last 50 years re-erecting them. Only, instead of doing so transparently, the new rules have been written to be facially neutral — in zoning codes and community input processes, and building regulations — even as they have a predictably disparate impact. Wealthy communities have learned how to play the game of exclusion ever more effectively.
And as we’ve stopped moving over the past 50 years, the country has become sharply more polarized. When communities were constantly revitalized by steady streams of new arrivals, they brought with them new life experiences, new ideas and new beliefs. Stagnant communities, by contrast, tend to homogenize over time, as people conform to the views of those around them. If we want to recapture our ability to see each other as fully human, we need to revive mobility.
To the title “Stuck.” What is the role of race and opportunity structures in your new book?
Geographic mobility — the chance to move toward opportunity — has long been the key driver of social and economic mobility. There’s no better way to understand the centrality of mobility to the American Dream than to trace the ways in which we’ve denied it to disfavored groups over time. The book unearths the contested history of mobility. It shows how minorities laid claim to this essential American freedom and the backlash that resulted. It traces the rise of zoning—first developed as a tool to ghettoize Chinese immigrants in California, then applied to Jews in New York, and as it spread, all too often used to target Black communities — as an instrument of racial and class segregation. It illuminates the ways in which increasingly restrictive rules and regulations have choked off the supply of affordable housing, constraining mobility today, with a disproportionate impact on the Black community.
Work as a public sector/government employee has long been a path to the middle class for Black and brown stivers, white ethnics, and immigrants to America. These are good jobs that have a certain amount of prestige and pride. Part of that prestige and pride was that these careers enabled a person to buy a home and achieve the American Dream for their families and future generations. The impact of the Trump administration’s gutting of the federal workforce will be felt widely across the United States.
Living in Washington, D.C., I see the impact of the sudden job cuts in the federal government all around me, every day. And there’s an added tragedy to the way they’re unfolding. The robust equal employment protections of the federal government have long made civil service jobs a path up to the middle class for populations that otherwise face endemic discrimination. That’s how my grandfather was able to get a job as a postal letter carrier. And today, it’s why the federal workforce is disproportionately drawn from members of minority groups. Historically, it’s been a win-win — the workers get the kind of jobs they deserve, and taxpayers get talented civil servants whose skills have been undervalued by a discriminatory private sector. Right now, though, it’s a lose-lose — those public-sector workers are losing their jobs, and we’re all losing the benefits of their skills and experience.
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Each well-qualified and dedicated worker who loses their job for no particular reason is an individual loss. But collectively, the cuts in the federal workforce are devastating the communities that already faced the greatest challenges.
What does it mean to lose one’s home and all that comes with it? This is a great injury to a person’s honor — especially for men — and feelings of being a productive member of society and not a “burden” or “taker”.
I wrote an entire book about the magic of mobility. But there’s a crucial caveat. I’m talking about mobility as an act of individual agency, of choice. There’s another kind of mobility that comes about involuntarily — a result of foreclosure, eviction, or housing insecurity. That’s generally devastating.
That has its origin in restrictive rules that have made it too hard to build housing in the places where it’s most desperately needed, driving up prices and rents. That squeezes the folks who live there, sometimes leading to the loss of housing, but leaving a far larger number in a state of precarity. And it makes it hard for people elsewhere who are struggling just to get by to follow the time-honored path of relocating toward greater opportunity. In effect, they can’t; they’ve been walled off from the places where their chances would be better. Both sets of people are denied the dignity of providing for their families.
The passing of wealth from the “Baby Boomers” to their children and other heirs is projected to be one of the greatest transfers of wealth in American history. That generational transition will reinforce the racial wealth gap because of how the GI Bill, VA and FHA home loan programs, and other government policies that created (white) suburbia and the American middle class discriminated against non-whites, and Black Americans in particular. The American Dream is a result of those policies. How is this dynamic reflected in your new book “Stuck”?
One story “Stuck” tries to hammer home is how large a role government policy — federal policy — played in our present inequality. A variety of New Deal programs made it easier for some Americans to move out to suburban homes, even as they made it all but impossible for others to follow them there. Racially restrictive covenants and zoning codes became a precondition of federal housing loans. The courts eventually struck down the racial restrictions, but communities soon discovered that zoning could be almost as effective a tool of exclusion.
So yes, all of these policies helped produce an enormous racial wealth gap, which is transmitted from one generation to the next. But it’s crucial to recognize that we’re not just feeling the long-term effects of historical policies — present-day zoning is still driving much of the inequality in America.
Our communities are being torn apart and pulled at by different forces. Huge corporations and multinationals are buying up portfolios of properties and entire neighborhoods. There are the “winners” in this increasingly stratified society who can move into formerly working-class, poor, and underclass communities and buy/rent property. The people who live there are being priced out and have fewer places to live. Affordable housing is increasingly an oxymoron and a cruel joke. In my neighborhood, I look for those U-Hauls and cars full of boxes on the last day of the month and all the things left abandoned on the sidewalk. It is very sad. What is this doing to the social and political fabric of this country? To individuals who must navigate it?
You’re pointing to two overlapping problems.
One is that, as you say, mobility has become the privilege of the educated and the affluent. That’s who still has the chance to move where they want. And because of the enormous advantages that mobility confers, the gap between them and everyone else is rapidly widening.
The other is scarcity. For as long as we’ve had cities, neighborhoods have changed. While we still produced housing to keep pace with demand, most people welcomed such changes. You could add some luxury townhouses for the rich, and they’d move in. The housing they vacated could be sold or rented to the merely affluent. The upper-middle class could move in behind them. And so on down the line, in a chain of moves you can trace through the property records, right down to the impoverished immigrant leaving one tenement for a slightly more spacious one. The magic of this was that almost everyone who moved ended up someplace nicer or better-suited to their needs than where they’d started.
But when there’s not enough housing to go around, it’s a whole different story. You still get chains, but they can be chains of displacement. The rich move in at the top, and everyone bumps down as rents rise. It’s like a game of musical chairs where you keep adding players, but not seats, and you give a head start based on wealth. The results are predictably cruel.
Who are the “winners” and “losers” in the story and social history you so deftly navigate in the new book?
The answer varies by era. In the golden age of mobility, the winners were the dispossessed. By fighting for, and securing, the right to live where they chose to, they gained the chance to decide who they wanted to be. Our society became gradually more equal, and the scope of civil rights enlarged.
Lately, though, the winners have been the propertied and the privileged, who have figured out how to rig the game in their favor, by using regulations and land-use rules to resegregate our society. And the losers? That’s everyone else, shut out of opportunity.
As has been my standard final question throughout the Trumpocene. Where do we go from here?
The story I tell in the book is in some ways depressing. But I actually mean it as a hopeful tale. By recovering the story of the foundational American freedom — the right to live where you want — I’m trying to point the way to a better, more just, and more equal future.
And it’s also hopeful because we don’t need to wait for a dysfunctional Congress to act, or for a presidential administration to want to tackle these challenges. The book focuses on state laws and local regulations. States and cities that want to restore mobility, recommit to growth, and open themselves to new arrivals seeking opportunity can do so on their own, right now. These problems are remarkably recent in vintage, and the historical record offers us proven alternatives that we can implement today.
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