The American Dream is now very sick and perhaps even on the verge of death. The Age of Trump and authoritarian populism are closely related to this in several ways.
The imperiled American Dream helped to fuel the righteous rage at the elites and a broken economic and political system that lifted Donald Trump back to the White House. If Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans and the larger right-wing antidemocracy movement achieve their goals — even partially so — of gutting the social safety net, hollowing out the federal workforce and enacting tax and other spending and budgetary policies that siphon off even more of the American people’s money and give it to the richest individuals and corporations, the American Dream will be even more out of reach. Public opinion polls and other research have consistently shown that a large percentage, if not the majority, of Americans believe that the American Dream is something in the past and that present and future generations will have a much more difficult life economically than previous generations.
