American Dream 3.0

[ymarkov]

A good perspective on the current crisis. Haven't seen so much relevant information brought together in one piece yet. I'd add a few details, but it's very good already. Most importantly, it adds a historical perspective that most of today's analyses lack.

By Walter Russell Mead

[...] For eighty years we have defined the American dream as an owner occupied family home, preferably with a nice swathe of crabgrass-free lawn around it. The home mortgage was the centerpiece of a society of consumers based on debt-financed living. It was life on the installment plan. The latest downturn in the housing market is one more grim signal that in its current form, the American Dream is going the way of the dodo. [...]

This isn’t the first time the American Dream has died. The old dream — your own farm rather than your own home — once dominated American culture, politics and family life as much as the family home ever did. The slow and painful death of that dream was one of the country’s core preoccupations in the first half of the twentieth century. The death of the new dream is likely to be a big deal as well.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/02/the-death-of-the-american-dream-i/

Comments

The Death of the American Dream I

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[malenkiy-scot.livejournal.com]

Good piece, thanks. Did you read any of his books? He seems to have influenced a lot of people in the liberal-Zionist camp, Michael Oren among them.

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

Philosophically, I find it interesting to note that the American Dream, both 1.0 and 2.0, are predicated upon owning something rather than being at the mercy of someone else's financial goodwill. That is, the collapse of these ideals leaves the average individual as a tenant farmer, a vassal in some sort of quasi-medievalistic scenario in which the local lord/landowner/banker/whatever to whom the land, and the money, revert. I suspect that 3.0 may involve owning one's own business - I've been seeing rumbles of that in the past decade - and still the central concept involved a freedom from fealty to another controlling entity.