The American Dream in 2020

Right now, it’s TBA.

The writers’ mission statement for the spring/summer print edition of The American Spectator calls for speculations on the state of the American Dream in this melancholy and totally nutso spring. Other than to state the obvious, that most Americans are dreaming of a return to the normal that we enjoyed and took for granted so recently, one has to conclude that the contours of the American Dream are more of a moving target now than they’ve been in living memory. Thanks to changing demographics, intense identity politics, and technology on steroids, there’s a lot less unum in our e pluribus than there has been in the past. Our national motto may be morphing into “out of one dream, many.” Subscribers, click here to read the full magazine! Not a subscriber? Click here to become a Patriot member today and receive access to The American Spectator in print and online! Even before corona and its attendant restrictions — some of these wise, others foolish and overreaching — the traditional American Dream, usually considered to be the good and long-term job, home ownership, marriage, and 2.5 children, was getting a pretty good working over by unbridled technological “progress,” robots in the workplace, exotic family arrangements, and artificial intelligence. (As for this last, what chance does artificialintelligence have against real stupidity?) Now if you Google “the American Dream,” it simply says, “To be announced.”

One casualty of the coronavirus and the draconian measures taken to head it off is predictability. This was pretty thin on the ground already and sinking fast, thanks to the items mentioned above. I certainly got out of the political prediction business after 2016. Nothing I predicted in that off-the-charts political year — save that Hillary wouldn’t be indicted and Jeb! wasn’t going anywhere — came to be. It looks like 2020 will be even trickier. We often hear nowadays that the stock market hates unpredictability. True enough. So does just about everybody ...