Expectations Gap

The main problem with the American Dream concept is that it attempts to obscure what I call the Expectations Gap. Back in the 1790's when John Adams was representing our new country in France, he wrote a prescient letter to his wife Abigail. He noted the great gap that yawned between what we were and what we wanted to become as a nation.

He rationalized that yawning gap by predicting that his generation would take care of the political foundations so that the next generation could secure its economic development allowing the third generation to aspire to the cultural achievements the new country would justify itself by. The biographies of his distinguished family bore out his predictions--if at a somewhat slower rate.

His son John Quincy "won" the election of 1824 in the Electoral College even though his opponent Andrew Jackson had beaten him in the popular vote, thereby delaying the extension of our political development by one election cycle. Meanwhile the Adams family fulfilled the economic aspect of Adams' prediction by helping establish the railroad network that accelerated our economic growth. And of course Henry Adams prefigured our cultural maturity with his writings including his novel "Democracy" critical of the so-called Gilded Age and particularly with his "Mont-St.Michel and Chartres" which questioned the growing dominance of the anti-humanistic Machine over the benign synthesis of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages.

In short, John Adams won the first two rounds in our growth before his great grandson Henry admitted a kind of defeat on the third level of Culture. In my model of our three stage development, the political landmark is 1828 when Andrew Jackson achieved the presidency for the "second" time, the economic turning point is the formation of trade unions in the 1890's, and the point of no return in our cultural life is 1927, when General Motors introduced styling in its automobile marketing.

From then on it would be a covert Cold War between the visions of authentic democracy by the likes of Walt Whitman, Louis Sullivan and John Dewey and the pragmatic expansion of a democracy merely for consumption by our business leaders. In that pivotal decade of the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge alleged that the business of America was business, an affirmation that appeared comical when the high velocity economy stumbled in the 1930's never to recover until the forced economic growth of World War II arms production.

Ever since, the precarious imbalance between consumption and demand has encouraged us to ignore crucial questions about how to really close the expectations gap between the American Dream of universal affluence and the gritty realities of underdevelopment both at home and abroad.

In this suppressed debate, the day by day indices of the stock market have tended to avoid long range assumptions about how both spreading affluence and cultural maturity can be supported if our minds are really concerned about the next recession. Meanwhile the individualizing rhetoric of the American Dream as a lottery where luck replaces pluck as the common aspiration keeps our political and economic agenda facile--geared to pandering for the votes of minorities who can be counted on to vote rather than spelling out long range strategies that will ensure the vitality of the accelerating globalization of the economy and culture.

Because the American Dream concept allows us to ignore community health as long as Big Winners can seem to legitimize the system (the dot.com bubble is just the latest of blips to justify our ignoring the systemic expectations gaps that stultify our country's stability), we never get down to brass tacks. What Henry George a century ago criticized as a society in which Progress and Poverty coexisted in an uneasy balance has morphed into an Ancien Regime of rotted inner cities surrounded by gated suburban communities which make a mockery of the American Dream.

Unwilling or unable address the inner decay, our cities build sports stadia instead of new school buildings in the forlorn hope that the alienated suburbanites will return in leisure moments to spend their excessive incomes as virtual tourists to their own urban regions.

And the exceptionalist rhetoric (America as the last best hope of mankind, the leader of the Free World, the only Superpower) degenerates the more it is mindlessly invoked into senseless blather that makes us unfit to lead anyone, especially ourselves. The final crippling irony of the American Dream illusion is that it keeps us from learning from other countries and cultures as the world painfully and precariously attempts to become one.

And still, we Americans remain eternally hopeful, ready for the next renewal, the next count of nine avoidance of a TKO. And since we are victims of a Good Idea gone bad, it will possibly be helpful to see how we got this way. I propose to show how in "The Language of Adam" we started lying to ourselves about egalitarianism; in "The Culture of Eve" how we started to fake with our culture; and in "The Community of Cain" these self-deluding tactics have led inevitably and inexorably to our culture of violence.

The British writer G.K.Chesterton once observed that Christianity hadn't been tried and found wanting; it had been tried and found hard. I would argue analogously that American egalitarianism has never been tried and found hard; it has been perceived as an evolving threat over our two centuries of not trying it openly and forthrightly and evaded systematically and endlessly.

The essential Expectations Gap has been the disconnect between our pretense at Egalitarianism and the actual politics of corporatization that finds true equality an abomination endlessly to be avoided. These bad habits have become inbred in us in the way we speak, the way we deal with art, and especially the infantile historical awareness we have of how we actually developed as a people.

I see this, finally, as a titanic if silent struggle between two American Walts--Walt Disney and Walt Whitman. We defer to the lesser Walt because it appears easier to live on a Disney level than on a higher, aspiring Whitman plateau. We are mistaken. The only way the American Dream can justify its rhetoric is by forthrightly closing the Expectations Gap for as many people as possible at home, and, increasingly, abroad.

And to reclaim our true heritage we must first see how we wandered astray. Either seriously fulfill the American Dream's implicit demands--or become just one of many power players elbowing for each and every advantage. No different from the rest. Awaken or fulfill. Those are the alternatives. An often puzzled world awaits our clearing up our misconceptions.