The American dream is dead | Opinion

The American dream is dead. Nearly 80 percent of Americans under 30 no longer believe it’s true, and a majority of those over 65 agree. While it’s tempting to blame this discontent on a lack of patriotism among young people, the reality is that Americans feel hopeless, cynical, and doomed for good reason: Through no fault of their own, the door to opportunity has been slammed in their faces.

With few exceptions, your birth date today will determine whether you will belong to a permanent class of debt-addicted renters who spend their lives struggling to keep up with money, or whether you will be a financially independent homeowner with the leisure to pursue your passions and become influential members of local society.

Let’s take the most striking example: the cost of living. With rising inflation and high interest rates, housing costs and average monthly mortgage payments are about 100 percent higher than they were four years ago. Twice as much-in just four years! This rate of change has effectively closed off the market to new buyers. According to Zillow, “The roughly $106,500 needed to comfortably afford mortgage payments on a typical home is well above what the typical U.S. household makes annually, an estimated $81,000.” As young people and families can no longer afford home prices, they are forced to either join the renter class – paying the national average monthly rent of over $2,100 – or move back in with their parents.

Just as economic success has always been only a part of the American dream, these economic challenges represent only a small part of the crisis facing Americans today. Beyond financial challenges, Americans face an acute crisis of meaning and belonging, with profound consequences for health, prosperity, and democracy itself.

This crisis manifests itself in four key areas:

For the first time in American history, there are more single adults (ages 18-55) without children than married adults with children, and 40 percent of all births are now out of wedlock, compared with 18 percent in 1980. The emergence of the isolated individual as the primary social unit is having radical implications for every aspect of American life, especially politics and the economy. Cut off from the support of family and civil society, we must expect increased demands on the state and increased debt-related financing to meet the needs of this new, socially isolated electorate.

Even after the pandemic, addiction rates in America remain high. Some habits, like social media, porn, video games and regular marijuana use—which recently surpassed alcohol consumption—are damaging mental health and socializing, and others, like opioids and methamphetamines, are proving deadly. Over 100,000 Americans now die annually from drug overdoses, an increase of about 500 percent since 2000. The burden of modern American life is so heavy that deaths of despair have become the new normal.

At the same time, a decline in civic literacy has contributed to a loss of cultural memory and identity. According to a recent survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, “over 70% of Americans fail a basic civic literacy test (and) only half could correctly name the branch of government in which bills become laws.” Our regime is based on the idea of ​​self-government under the law. We call ourselves citizens, not subjects, but most people lack a basic understanding of how our government works. Without knowledge of this system and an appreciation of our past, it is impossible to hope for a better future.

After all, 28 percent of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion, and only 21 percent attend a weekly religious service. Our nation’s second president, John Adams, wrote, “Our Constitution was designed for one moral and religious people only. It is utterly unsuited to the government of any other people.” Without a common religious foundation, the ethical basis of our laws erodes, the social support of churches diminishes, and the direction of our culture becomes fundamentally materialistic and nihilistic.

Faced with such major, even existential, challenges, the rising generation is looking for answers—and mentors. They want to learn how to live well, but feel powerless to take action. This explains the growing popularity of lifestyle influencers like Jordan Peterson, who are crowding thousands of young men into venues in cities like Detroit, Michigan; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Fargo, North Dakota, in search of meaning and belonging.

As we look toward the 2024 election, the crisis of “American carnage” that former President Donald Trump aptly, if shockingly, described in his 2017 inaugural address is more acute today than it was seven years ago. The great task facing our political leaders today will be to address it head-on, by speaking to the heart and offering a plan to lead Americans from isolation to independence, from despair and addiction to hope and health, from shame to confidence, and from doubt and loneliness to faith and community.

Given the scale of the problem, the results in November may depend less on lawfare campaigns against Trump or Joe Biden’s intellectual acuity than on which candidate can ease the deep pain – economic and spiritual – of the American people and show a path to restoring the American dream.

John A. Burtka IV is President and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Editor of Gateway to Statesmanship: Extracts from Xenophon to Churchill.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.