The American dream is dead. Or at least, that’s the bipartisan conventional wisdom among a healthy portion of our leadership class. Donald Trump said as much during the announcement of his 2016 presidential bid (“But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before,” he assured his audience). His “American carnage” narrative was mirrored by his counterparts on the populist Left: “For many,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted in 2016, “the American Dream has become a nightmare.”
But if a new Echelon Insights study commissioned by the Walton Foundation is to be believed, most of the country (or at least the ones who live outside of the Washington beltway) don’t see it that way. Most notably, young people and nonwhites (the very people who demagogues such as Sanders hold up as the most downtrodden victims of the system) are far more optimistic about their prospects than elite narratives would lead us to believe.
The Echelon Insights study “surveyed a diverse and representative sample of 2,002 members of Generation Z (ages 13-23) and 2,002 Millennials (ages 24–39) across the United States, followed by in-depth conversations with 146 additional respondents in these age groups.” The result? “Millennials and Generation Z are optimistic about their future, and two-thirds believe the American Dream is achievable,” according to a Walton Family Foundation press release. “Nearly half of young Americans expect to have a life better than their parents — with Black, Latino and Asian respondents reporting greater optimism.”
The lattermost point is particularly important in light of the pervasive 1619 Project-style racial pessimism that dominates our elite institutions: A plurality of every racial subgroup in the Generation Z and millennial demographics told pollsters that they expect to have a better life than their parents, but nonwhite Generation Zers and millennials were significantly more likely to express this belief, all in decisive majorities, than their white peers.
To live a better life than one’s parents, and to know that one’s children can reasonably expect the same, is the simple yet humbly miraculous essence of the American dream. And it is a misunderstanding to think of this exclusively in terms of material wealth. Attempts to measure the “health” of the American dream in purely economic terms have always had limited utility; the promise of America is, first and foremost, a fundamentally spiritual one.
Perhaps the most heartening feature of the Walton study is the fact that young people intrinsically seem to understand this: “The American dream,” as one young respondent told pollsters, “is not about the items but the opportunity you have.” Or alternatively, in the words of another: “I believe the American dream is built upon the notion that anyone regardless of race and gender would have the opportunity to progress within society in attaining a meaningful life.”
We are, and always have been, a uniquely aspirational country. It’s an optimism that’s written into our founding documents, and imbued in the character of a people formed by the hopeful spirit of the generations of immigrants who arrived on our shores. The history of the United States is not defined by a predominant collective ethnic or religious identity, but by an unlikely patchwork of dreamers, united across space and time by a shared belief in the radical, historically unprecedented idea that a human society could be capable of freedom and self-government. “God somehow called America to do a special job for mankind and the world,” Martin Luther King, Jr. once said. “Never before in the history of the world have so many racial groups and so many national backgrounds assembled together in one nation. … America is the world in miniature and the world is America writ large.”
This fundamental spirit of possibility is the unlikely genius of America: A boundless idealism (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) paired with a persistent skepticism about the claims of politics, visible in the structure of our Constitution. The ideal of self-government means that there has always been a gap between the public and the ambitions of those who would presume to rule us. As the study shows us, that’s as true now as it’s ever been.
To be sure, the study also shows that young people recognize the real problems contained in our current moment — it would be naive for them not to. The polled Generation Zers and millennials express legitimate concerns about the state of our environment, for example. (A pressing concern for young people of all political dispositions.) But in spite of the pessimism, the hand-wringing, and the dark prognostication of our political and cultural leaders, itself indicative of a profoundly broken and neurotic elite culture, the next generation still maintains that unique spirit that has made this the greatest country on Earth: a can-do attitude, a willingness to rise to the challenges of our time, and a fundamental belief in the potential of the American idea.
Nate Hochman (@njhochman) is a Young Voices associate contributor and a senior at Colorado College.
