American Dream: Post Mortem

This is going to be difficult to hear, but it wasn’t the Baby Boomers who killed the American Dream.

Contrary to popular belief, the American Dream has been dead and buried for longer than anyone wants to admit. 

The progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries mortally wounded the American Dream, and the New Deal Era finished it off. By the time the Boomers were born after the 2nd World War, the world was living in the Post-War Nightmare, not the Post-War Dream as commies like Roger Waters would have called it.

In actuality, Baby Boomers were the first generation to spend the entirety of their lives in the post-American Dream world. Before the progressive era, the real dream for Americans was to build something for themselves and then pass that on to their children to keep building.

In the progressive era, the idea began to change from working for yourself to getting “a good job with full pay and you’re okay” (Okay, Roger Waters had a point here, but it wasn’t the one he thought he was making). 

Under the guise of reform, economic power was consolidated.

Under the guise of trust-busting, the regulatory and administrative state that would choke out entrepreneurship, like a drugged-up girl who laughs at Andrew Tait’s penis, was born. 

After communism was introduced to this country under Teddy Roosevelt, the original Affluent White Liberal Savior, the American people went from having a real chance to build a legacy for themselves to becoming debt slaves to the state. There is a direct line between Teddy Roosevelt’s focus on progressive reforms to rein in inequality (Yes, that was a major tenet of his Presidency) and the complete destruction of the American Dream under his cousin Franklin a couple of decades later. 

The 1989 single by the country music legends Alabama “Song of the South” unintentionally tells the story of the end of the American Dream. 

Set during the Great Depression, the narrator’s mother becomes ill, making his dad depressed. This eventually leads to the family farm being taken over by the county. The dad then gets a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, allowing the family afford a more comfortable, modern life that now includes a washing machine and a Chevrolet.

The kicker is that the family went from owning a farm and producing for themselves to working for the government. That was when the American Dream died. When working for a company, or worse, the government, became what people aspired to. Trading independence for comfort. Trading ownership of their lives for 40-hour workweeks and pensions. 

This is the world the Boomers were brought up in. A world in which the government, for the first time in history, had become the driving economic force of the nation. The world Eisenhower warned us of. The world of the Military Industrial Complex, the Great Society, and endless amounts of government spending. 

Sure, Boomers did better than subsequent generations, but that was because they were the first to spend their entire lives in the United Soviet States of America. 

There was an attempt to save the American Dream in the Neoliberal Era (1980 - 2000) from Reagan to Bill “The Era of Big Government is Over” Clinton. Sadly, the 2000 election became a battle of left and right-wing populism, with Gore running as a “real Democrat” and Bush running as a “Compassionate Conservative”.

Since then, we have two political parties that are essentially post-liberal big government shills. Both parties use either white guilt or nationalism to distract voters from the fact that the government is looting the treasury and taking out more and more debt in their name to keep the welfare state, the source of the government’s power, afloat. 

Today, the government is far and away the largest employer in the country. 

It’s even more evident when you consider the number of “private sector” jobs that exist due to government regulations. Human Resources Management, I’m looking in your direction. The sad fact is that the government, at all levels, is stealing money in the guise of taxation from private industry and using that money to compete with the industry it is robbing from for workers. 

2020, for all intents and purposes, killed off the last of the entrepreneurs we had in this country. The Federal Government’s shutdown of the economy left only those who could absorb the cost of doing business. This, along with the regulatory and administrative state, has prevented the American Dream from returning to life. The worst thing is that nothing short of a worldwide Carrington-level event that somehow sends humanity back to the steam age will bring it back. 

Even then it would be a crap shoot that we wouldn’t get stuck with even more government.