The American Dream is a phrase which was first articulated in that form in 1931, at the heart of the Great Depression. I suppose that there are some parallels between that time and now.
James Truslow Adams, the populariser of the phrase, defined the American Dream as ‘a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.’ He clarified that it was not about material possessions and wealth, but ‘a dream of a social order in which each man or woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for that they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position’.
In the past few decades, as corporate America has increasingly turned its back on the working class and lower middle class in favour of higher profits through the management practices pioneered by ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch at General Electric in the 1980s, the American Dream has been placed at greater peril than before. Student debt, healthcare costs, and the disappearance of high paying and secure jobs for a large proportion of workers has caused the middle class to shrink, and the average American to become poorer and more vulnerable, more susceptible than at any time since the 1930s to the possible popularist manipulations of a demagogue.
The American novelist Sinclair Lewis was one of those writers who saw what we consider the American Dream to be more of a nightmare. In novels such as Babbitt, Mainstreet and Arrowsmith, he raised a mirror to narrow minded, small town, Middle America, implying that it was a culture hostile to the individual, imposing a stifling conformity through the social order. [Perhaps Lewis saw, as an intellectual who had been raised a socialist, with a serious alcohol abuse problem, that he would always be an outsider in that society.]
He did go further in some more disturbing novels. In Elmer Gantry, he mocked the hypocrisy of a lecherous and avaricious tent preacher, pursuing a career as a professional evangelist whilst leading a hypocritical double life as a womaniser, always avoiding the consequences of his conduct. He was almost prophetic, writing some 60 years before the sex scandals of various televangelists in the late 1980s.
Another of his novels, It Can’t Happen Here, was suddenly rediscovered by Americans in late 2016, causing it to become a best seller. Written in 1935, it covers the rise and fall of a populist demagogue (probably based on Huey Long) who, once elected President, dismantles American Democracy and rules as a dictator.
When you look at the recent misadventures of Donald Trump, it is not hard to see what Sinclair Lewis would make of the situation, nor how Lewis would interpret the social forces which have propelled him to power, and which may reinstall him in the White House next January.
When Trump was first elected in 2016, I did not have a problem with it. Being a conservative person, I would, if I were an American citizen, most likely vote Republican. I saw him as being different from the mainstream consensus of modern American politics in that he was both a nativist (as in the anti-immigrant ‘Know Nothing’ party of the 1850s) and isolationist (a long held American position where they did not interfere outside of the American continent and its immediate surroundings, but which was finally abandoned by its former adherents in the late 1940s).
His unfiltered tactlessness and gracelessness seemed refreshing at the time. After all, why should the dispossessed and disenfranchised former denizens of the American lower middle class find a voice against the bipartisan will of political elites who offered them nothing but continued decline into poverty and economic insecurity? Where was their American Dream anymore?
It was only in the period after his failure to get reelected in November 2020, where he urged officials in various states to overturn election results and then stood by as his angry supporters ultimately stormed the Capitol building to force the Congress to do the bidding of the mob rather than their actual sworn duty that I saw that there was a serious problem.
Since then, I have tended to see Trump as a combination of a buffoon, a paradox and a potential existentialist threat to the whole idea of America.
The last century of the Roman Republic saw a growing crisis as the former small land holders who had made up the bulk of that society came to be dispossessed of their stake in the nation, making them into an unstable urbanised poor, able to be played by rival factions of the rich, in escalating episodes of discontent and violence, culminating in the autocracy imposed by the Caesars.
Trump did not create the ‘deplorables’ who not only vote for him and cheer him on, but who may storm the Capitol in his cause. Social and economic conditions in the past half century have done that – most particularly the emergence of ‘Welchism’ as the predominant corporate management philosophy which has impoverished them and left them with little to lose.
Trump is simply a populist demagogue who is best able to harness the anger and fear of that growing subclass of people who have been ejected from Middle America in recent decades. He has nothing in common with them – he is rich and powerful and cloaked in privilege. This is clearly apparent to all. But he is able to make them believe that he is their friend, and that he is pursuing policies which will reverse all the disadvantage that has been imposed on them in that time – he will give them back the secure well paying factory jobs that have been taken away (by his ‘friend’ Neutron Jack) and restore to them their lost access to the American Dream.
The reality of course is much different. Policies from his first term mostly benefited the super-rich elites, and the ‘deplorable’ remain as badly off as ever.
At the same time as he is appealing, much as the presidential candidate in Lewis’ 1935 novel, to the impoverished masses, Trump also is fanatically supported by the Evangelical Christian Right. Just like the fictional Elmer Gantry and the not so fictional Jim Bakker, Trump is a serial womaniser. Unlike those aforementioned Christian characters, the thrice married Trump does not hide this. It is visible and in plain sight. Yet despite his personal failure to live up to the moral standards of the Evangelicals, they support him. This in itself in a major paradox, but possibly best explained by the estrangement between the educated liberal elites and the more conservative Christian undercurrent of Middle America.
As an outsider looking in, I sometimes do need to remind myself that whilst the USA speaks the same language as the UK and Australia, Americans think in a very different way, particularly about religion. [After all, even Homer Simpson goes to church every Sunday. Think about that!] And that difference is both hard to comprehend and disturbing in its very nature.
So where does that leave us? The failure of the Democrat party to find a non-comatose presidential candidate until this past week has put Trump in the catbird seat to resume the presidency. With the statements which he and his closest advisers have made on both domestic and foreign policy in the time since his defeat in November 2020 growing increasingly eccentric, sinister and outright irresponsible, a second Trump presidency is going to be far less innocuous than the first.
If this was Argentina, a nation which has since the 1930s been prone to populist autocrats and military dictators, we could relax and chuckle. But this is America, the greatest economy in the world, and the bulwark for democracy against totalitarian regimes. Nor is this a time when, with the wolf warrior aggressiveness of Communist China and the armed irredentism of Putin’s Russia, we can say the world is at peace.
There is a lot to worry about and Trump, if elected president as seems quite likely, could truly catalyse a descent into global chaos.
Lost For Words! 