The American Dream Is Collapsing. Are We Too Angry to Fix It? – Esquire

Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Its the subtitle of Todd Gitlins history of the 1960s, and a reminder that peace and harmony have never been staples of American life. Self-government is a messy business, a constant collision of interests, ideologies, and primal instincts. Thats particularly true in a nation that was in contravention of its founding principles from its first moment, and that has spent every moment since struggling to make them real. If you look back fondly on a happier, more tranquil time, you are gazing back on a landscape of American mythology.

And yet it feels worse now. Its hard to dispute that, in the words of the oft-mocked Marianne Williamson, theres a dark, psychic force at work in this country today. (This was true even before we were hit by a pandemic, when this story went to press.) By the end of the primary season, the major 2020 presidential candidates that remained were either channeling this energy or attempting to defuse it. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump constitute two stark expressions of populist ragethe incumbent president as a vessel of fear and resentment of a changing world and Sanders as the next wave of reaction against a system in which so few have taken so much for themselves and left so little for everyone else to scrap over. Only one directed this rage at the material source of our vast structural problems, while the other offered scapegoats. But they both seized on our perilous state of affairs. Joe Biden, meanwhile, reached the end of primary season running on a return to the Decent and the Normal, as a healer who could balm the blisters of rage without truly putting out the fire.

The top 20 percent of American households control 77 percent of all household wealth in this country, more than triple what the middle 60 percent of households control. The wealthiest 1 percent controls $25 trillion all by itself, more than that middle 60 percent190 million peoplehas with $18 trillion. But any recognizable definition of middle class is collapsing anyway, shattered along with many rungs on the ladder of social mobility that undergirds our most intoxicating export, the American Dream. We cannot survive as a nation where ZIP code is destiny, and where a man can pledge to spend a fraction of his $60 billion fortune to make himself the president while more than half of our citizens live paycheck to paycheck and half a million sleep on the streets each night. Fifty-three million Americans are classified as low-wage workers who do not make a living wage44 percent of the workforce and the fastest-growing part of it. We cannot go on when parents no longer believe their children will lead a better life than they did, and while millions feel the whole world slipping away from them. American gross domestic product grew over the last several years while average life expectancy fell, fueled in part by deaths of despair. Hope is a terrible thing to lose.

It is not just Twitter thats making us so angry, nor is it just cable news. Nor is it even the injustice weve accepted since our founding, or the discrimination we continue to allow now. Its not just that real wages have failed to keep up with the rising cost of living for decades, or that televisions have gotten so cheap while the costs of health care and college have exploded. Its not merely that we increasingly get our information from different ecosystems and thus live in separate worlds, unable to communicate with one another and find a way forward. More than all that, we have stripped too many of our people of their hope, and rage and despair flowed readily into the void. Sometimes it even gives way to apathy and nihilism, unreason as defense mechanism. Trolling as politics, food-fight discourse. Even the righteous anger never seems to purify us, providing heat but no light. Perhaps there will come a time when things no longer deepen and darken by the day, as new enemies perpetually corporialize in the shadow of our own creeping delusion. As it stands, the fury threatens to subsume us.

This article appears in the April/May issue of Esquire. Subscribe

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The American Dream Is Collapsing. Are We Too Angry to Fix It? - Esquire