The American Dream

Examples of The American Dream in the following topics:

• Class Structure in the U.S.

  • An example of someone who achieves the American Dream might be a person who is born to poor parents but is smart and hardworking and eventually goes on to receive scholarships for a college education and to become a successful businessperson.
  • Modern sociologists argue that in the vast majority of cases, people do not achieve the American Dream — instead, people born to poor parents are likely to stay within the lower class, and vice versa.
  • Many Americans recognize a simple three-tier model that includes the upper class, the middle class, and the lower or working class.
  • According to the "American Dream," American society is meritocratic and class is achievement-based.
  • Discuss America’s class structure and its relation to the concept of the "American Dream"

• Social Mobility in the U.S.

  • Strong social and economic mobility is considered part of American Dream, though there is relatively low social mobility in the U.S.
  • The American Dream is often associated with a series of novels written by Horatio Alger in the late 19th century, most of which told the story of a young person born to a lower class family who achieved higher status through hard work and virtue.
  • Socioeconomic mobility in the United States refers to the movement of Americans from one social class or economic level to another, often by changing jobs or marrying.
  • The belief that there is significant social mobility in America, or in other words, that Americans can and do rise from humble origins to riches, is called the American Dream.
  • For women, another explanation for the glass ceiling effect in the American work force is the job-family trade off.

• Staking the Desk: Unequal Funding

  • In 2000, affluent students, students who could otherwise afford to pay for college, received "merit" scholarships worth 82% of the need-based aid received by students with the lowest family incomes.
  • Whereas some people laud education as the great equalizer, others observe the effects of school funding schemes and conclude that they actually reinforce inequality and stratification.
  • According to the American dream, children should be able to use their education to achieve upward mobility.
  • This ends up reinforcing the existing status hierarchy by keeping the affluent wealthy, and the poor unable to attend college.
  • Examine the inequality in public school systems and the implications for a student's future

• Countercultures

  • Modern American Marxist political groups are examples of countercultures -- they promote a worldview and set of norms and values that are contrary to the dominant American system.
  • In the United States, the counterculture of the 1960s became identified with the rejection of conventional social norms of the 1950s.
  • As the 1960s progressed, widespread tensions developed in American society that tended to flow along generational lines regarding the war in Vietnam, race relations, sexual mores, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, and a materialistic interpretation of the American Dream.
  • The counterculture in the United States lasted from roughly 1964 to 1973 — coinciding with America's involvement in Vietnam — and reached its peak in 1967, the "Summer of Love. " The movement divided the country: to some Americans, these attributes reflected American ideals of free speech, equality, world peace, and the pursuit of happiness; to others, the same attributes reflected a self-indulgent, pointlessly rebellious, unpatriotic, and destructive assault on America's traditional moral order.
  • Apply the concept of counterculture to the rise and collapse of the US Hippie movement

• Suburbanization

  • These racist practices, called redlining, barred African-Americans from pursuing home ownership, even when they could afford it.
  • African-Americans and other minorities were relegated to a state of permanent rentership.
  • Louis is 49.2 percent African-American, 43.9 percent Caucasian, 3.5 percent Hispanic, 2.9 percent Asian, and 0.3 percent Native American.
  • Louis County is 70.3 percent Caucasian, 23.3 percent African American, 3.5 percent Asian, 2.5 percent Hispanic, and 0.03 percent Pacific Islander.
  • "Making it to the suburbs" has become a modern iteration of the American dream.

• Social Mobility

  • Social mobility is the movement of an individual or group from one social position to another over time.
  • In the United States, the trope of the American Dream holds that individuals who work hard and demonstrate intelligence will be professionally successful and attain high social status.
  • By contrast, in the traditional Indian caste system the highest social position was occupied by those who demonstrated priestliness.
  • Thus, the degree of mobility in Western capitalist states depends on the extent to which individuals have access to educational and economic opportunity.
  • Countries with higher intergenerational income elasticity have lower social mobility -- in countries on the left of the graph, children are likely to attain the same social status as their parents.

• Social Class in the U.S.

  • In presidential elections, campaigns often draw on social class distinctions to claim that their opponent is too elite to understand the needs of the majority of Americans.
  • Many Americans believe in a simple three-class model that includes the rich or upper class, the middle class, and the poor or working class.
  • Meanwhile, some scholars deny the very existence of discrete social classes in American society.
  • According to the logic of the American Dream, American society is meritocratic and class is achievement based.
  • The poverty rate corresponds to what proportion of Americans live in the lowest economic strata of the hierarchical class system.

• Social class in America

  • Sociologists Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl developed a model of the American class social class structure.
  • Today, the richest one percent of Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country's income and control 40 percent of its wealth.
  • The gap between the wealth of white families and the wealth of African-American families and Hispanics has also increased.
  • Research shows that Americans believe in equality.
  • The American dream contains the belief that every individual can achieve prosperity and success through hard work and self discipline.

• Psychological Approaches to the Self

  • The psychology of the self is the study of the cognitive or affective representation of one's identity.
  • In modern psychology, the earliest formulation of the self derived from the distinction between the self as "I," the subjective knower, and the self as "me," the object that is known.
  • Heinz Kohut, an American psychologist, theorized a bipolar self that was comprised of two systems of narcissistic perfection, one of which contained ambitions and the other of which contained ideals.
  • To Jung, the Self is both the whole and the center.
  • He also believed that the Self was the source of dreams, and that the Self would appear in dreams as an authority figure that could either perceive the future or guide an individual's present.

• Protestantism

  • The Great Awakening has been called the first truly American event.
  • The supporters of the Awakening and its evangelical thrust, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, became the largest American Protestant denominations by the first decades of the 19th century.
  • They were also disappointed that Baptists and Methodists, many of whom had advocated for abolition after the American Revolution, ended up backsliding on that commitment.
  • When their discontent could not be contained, forceful black leaders followed what was becoming an American habit, and they formed new denominations.
  • Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his famous "I Have a Dream" speech