Separate Realities: The Dream and the Iceberg - Scarecrow Press

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CLASS ISSUES IN THE MEDIA: THE AMERICAN DREAM (continued) Reality-based television programming offers a different, but no less compelling, kind of “proof” that the American Dream is alive and available to ordinary people. Popular TV reality programs in the latter 2000s, such as American Idol, Survivor, and The Apprentice, elevate “winners” into Cinderella-like celebrities who appear to attain (at least for awhile) levels of economic success associated with the American Dream. In some respects, celebrity showcase reports, as well as reality TV programs, can be viewed as contemporary versions (with better production values and with real, rather than fictional, characters) of Horatio Alger Jr.’s popular “rags-to-riches” novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (before the term American Dream was coined). 5 Today, as in the past, the U.S. popular media message is twofold: first, the American Dream is widely attainable; second, those who have achieved the dream—at spectacular levels—deserve not only their success, but also fawning media attention, public applause, and popular fascination. Partly as a result of the mainstream media’s framing of the American Dream as a reality that can readily lead to riches, this view appears to be firmly embedded in U.S. culture. 6 The media-driven popular faith in the dream-wealth linkage leads many Americans (especially the young) to view themselves not as part of the working class or even the middle class but as members of what might be called the “prerich class.” To illustrate, a recent poll found that nearly 25 percent of U.S. teenagers believe they will have $1 million in assets by age forty, and 15 percent think they will earn more than $1 million annually. 7 For believers encouraged by “rags-to-riches” media reports, the American Dream means they are certain to make the transition to the “actually rich class” in the not-too-distant future. With such a mind-set, it is not difficult to imagine that believers in the dream may also entertain the fantasy that when they succeed, perhaps Oprah will ask them to appear on her show and share their success stories with her (and her audience). NOTES 1. The Oprah Winfrey Show, “What Class Are You? Inside America’s Taboo Topic,” on August 24, 2006, the Internet at http://www.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200604/tows_past_20060421.jhtml (visited May 13, 2006). 2. The figure cited refers to the average annual number of U.S. newspaper articles with “American Dream” found in headline titles and lead paragraphs in the 2000–2006 period. It is based on the authors’ analysis, using appropriate search parameters, of U.S. newspapers indexed in the Lexis-Nexis data base and published during this period. 3. Wessel, “As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls.” 4. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (New York: Metropolitan, 2005). 5. Richard L. Zweigenhaft, “Making Rags out of Riches,” Extra! (January–February 2004): 27–28; Zweigenhaft and Domhoff, Diversity in the Power Elite, 3. 6. National League of Cities, “The American Dream in 2004”; Center for a New American Dream, “New American Dream Survey Report,” New York Times, Class Matters, 6. 7. Mark Maier, “High-School Economics: Corporate Sponsorship and Pro-Market Bias,” Dollars and Sense (May–June 2002): 15.
Separate Realities 93 NOTES 1. See, for example, Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); Harry J. Crockett Jr., “The Achievement Motive and Differential Occupational Mobility in the United States,” American Sociological Review 27 (1962): 191–204; Reinhard Bendix and Frank W. Howton, “Social Mobility and the American Business Elite—II,” British Journal of Sociology 9 (1958): 1–14. 2. Peter Blau and Otis D. Duncan, The American Occupational Structure (New York: Wiley, 1967); David L. Featherman and Robert M. Hauser, Opportunity and Change (New York: Academic Press, 1978). 3. Joan Huber and William H. Form, Income and Ideology: An Analysis of the American Political Formula (New York: Free Press, 1973); James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith, Beliefs about Inequality: Americans’ Views of What Is and What Ought to Be (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1986); Beth A. Rubin, Shifts in the Social Contract (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996), 7–8. 4. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1933). In his best selling book, Adams wrote, “The American Dream [is] that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyman, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. . . . It is . . . a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable . . . regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position” (415). 5. Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, “Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide,” New York Times, May 15, 2005, 16. 6. John E. Farley, “What’s in the American Dream,” in Sociology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 99; Center for a New American Dream, “New American Dream Survey Report,” September 2004, 4–5, on the Internet at http://www.newdream.org/about/new.php (visited August 27, 2005); Change to Win, “The American Dream Survey 2006,” August 28, 2006, on the Internet at http://www.changetowin.org/features/the-american-dream-survey.html (visited October 18, 2006); National League of Cities, “The American Dream in 2004: A Survey of the American People,” September 2004, on the Internet at http://www.nlc.org (visited November 5, 2005). 7. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “Count Your Blessings: NeoCons and NeoLibs Take a Big Hit as Voters Say No to Bush, War and Free Trade,” CounterPunch (November 8, 2006), on the Internet at http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11082006.html (visited November 8, 2006); William Greider, “Watershed,” Nation (December 4, 2006): 14–18; Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, “It Was a ‘Throw the Bums Out’ and a ‘Change America’s Direction’ Election,” Lowdown (December 2006): 1–4; John Nichols, “What Can Sherrod Brown Do for the Democrats?” Nation (October 2, 2006): 11–14; John Nichols, “Being Like Bernie,” Nation (August 15–22, 2005): 15–18. 8. Roger Bybee, “NAFTA’s Hung Jury,” Extra! (May–June 2004): 14–15. CBS News/New York Times poll, “Foreign Trade and the U.S. Economy,” January 31, 2006, 2; “Little Support for Bush’s Social Security Agenda,” American Teacher (September 2005): 17; David Sirota, “A Primary Concern: Free Trade Could Be Key for Democrats in ’08,” In These Times (April 2006): 28–29; David Sirota, “Debunking ‘Centrism,’” Nation (January 3, 2005): 18–19. 9. Steve Rendall and Anna Kosseff, “Are Progressive Views Unpopular?” Extra! (September– October 2004): 19. David Sirota, “Embracing Populism,” In These Times (December 2006): 4. 10. Business Roundtable, “Business Roundtable Deeply Disappointed by Doha Talks Suspension” (press release, July 24, 2006); Dana R. Fisher, Kevin Stanley, David Berman, and Gina Neff, “How Do Organizations Matter? Mobilization and Support for Participants at Five Globalization Protests,” Social Problems 52 (2005): 102–21; “Shifting the Trade Debate, CAFTA and Beyond,” Public Citizen News, 2005 Annual Report, March–April 2006, 7; “Unions Join Protests over the Next Step in Free Trade, the FTAA,” Labor Notes (January 2004): 8–9; Timothy A. Wise, “World Trade Talks Collapse,” Dollars and Sense (September–October 2006): 44–45.
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