The other day, I was flipping through the Internet and came across a story in the Wall Street Journal with the headline, “Voters See American Dream Slipping Out of Reach, WSJ/NORC Poll Shows.” What? I had to read it, and sure enough, “Only 36% of voters in a new Wall Street Journal/NORC survey said the American dream still holds true, substantially fewer than the 53% who said so in 2012 and 48% in 2016 in similar surveys of adults by another pollster.” So, what happened to our country?
I’ll put this out there at the start: the American Dream is not dead; what is dead is most people’s idea of what that phrase means. The Journals writes, “The American dream—the proposition that anyone who works hard can get ahead, regardless of their background—has slipped out of reach in the minds of many Americans.”
That’s not really what the American Dream is – the United States is not Lake Wobegone, where everyone is “above average.” If everyone “gets ahead,” then getting ahead would mean nothing, just as if the minimum wage was a million dollars per year, people making only one million dollars would be poor, as everything would cost exponentially more, etc.
The American Dream is a shot at success, success of any level. There’s a reason almost all innovation and invention comes from the United States, and it’s not dumb luck or coincidence. Sadly, however, much of that reality is lost on Americans, and the leaders in innovation and invention are immigrants (of the legal variety) who come here with a better understanding of what the American Dream is compared to natural-born citizens.
Much of the outside world sees the US as the land of opportunity it is, while people growing up here see it through the lens of the left-wing educational complex, which tells everyone the country is a bastion of oppression and sucking.
Our culture is rotten.
White kids are taught they’ve got all the advantages because of their skin color, and they’re monsters because of it. That their parents were just this side of slave owners, and everything in life was the result of “white privilege,” not hard work. Hate yourself; either join the progressive fight, or you’re the enemy.
Young black people are taught the country as racist, one where the only path to prosperity is being an athlete or musician, not because it’s true, but because the entertainment and media industries – also controlled by the left – only highlight those options. To the extent a black business leader is ever mentioned or profiled, it is to highlight how they “overcame” this oppression. If “oppression” is actually real, you can’t “overcome” it at all; you’re oppressed. All you can do is escape or overthrow it. Overcoming it is impossible if it’s actual oppression.
But the true oppression we have in this country is instituted and administered by the people spending the most time talking about oppression, and that’s in the public school system. It’s not holding people down; it’s weighing them down with garbage – teaching people they are victims who will never succeed while denying them the only accurate tool to succeed: an actual education.
You tell someone that they can’t get ahead, that “the system” is rigged against them; guess what happens when something doesn’t go their way? They get discouraged.
Everyone fails at some point; they don’t get the job or promotion they want. But if you’ve been conditioned your whole life to believe you’re oppressed, those stumbles people used to learn and better themselves from are another straw smashing the camel’s body to bits.
Sooner or later, after being told you can’t get ahead by people in positions of authority and trust, you believe it. We used to be more patient as a society, which made it difficult for this cancerous attitude to take hold because advancement – doing better than your parents’ generation – was what the American Dream was largely about. So, stumbles out of the gate were recovered, and people did better. Now, we are a microwave society that demands everything. Next weekend is forever away, and people on Instagram are having fun today, so it’s unfair! You’re a victim; you’re oppressed.
Success is reached by so many “social media influencers” who come across as so dumb they likely couldn’t tie a shoelace if their life depended on it. A nation of Veruca Salts can’t understand why they can’t fly private, so the whole system must be destroyed.
They’ve all been marinated in a culture of entitlement while denigrating the concept of earning. Well, you can’t “tax the rich,” no matter how large the writing is across a bulbous ass, if there aren’t any rich in the first place. And you can’t get away with writing it across where your head usually is if you don’t have an ignorant audience trained to receive it without getting lost in your own hypocrisy obediently.
The American Dream is alive, but it’s not well. It’s the baby, and the Democratic Party is the British nanny charged with taking care of it. We need an intervention. We need someone who embodies that dream to virtually smack people across the face with a dead fish and wake them up because the Dream exists, but it’s not guaranteed. It’s not a birthright. It’s an objective, one you have actually to work hard for.
The concept of hard work is nearly dead, too – everyone wants to be Kim Kardashian now; they don’t want to release a sex tape of them being ridden by a long-forgotten rapper and date a series of losers while parlaying that into a vapid reality show to get to where she is.
That might be a little unfair, at least to Ray J (people remember him), but you get the point. The culture is rotten, and the average person just doesn’t want to do the work anymore. Ironically, the “influencers” they sit around watching worked hard to do whatever stupid thing they do. No one will admit it, and it’s not working how it has been traditionally understood, but it wasn’t immediate or easy.
Still, no one wants to admit it or accept it. They don’t understand it; the concept, I mean. All they know is someone else has it better than they do and, somehow, is unfair. And because of that, the American Dream has been denied them.
That sense of entitlement is true oppression. And the people instilling it – beating it – into kids today are the same people who oppressed people before the Civil War: Democrats. They’re doing it differently now, but the outcome is the same – Democrats never change their objectives, only their tactics. They’re now doing it to everyone, not one specific group, but make no mistake – the objective is the same.
To achieve that objective, they have to kill the American Dream once and for all. They’ve failed, thus far, on that front, but as that Wall Street Journal poll shows, they’re still goosestepping their way toward that goal, and at a surprising pace. Next year might be our last chance to stop them.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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