I've been working on articulating the difference between existing and flourishing as human beings. Existing just requires water, calories, and shelter. Flourishing requires other people to engage in our narrative (and by that I mean a lot more than just conversation, although conversation is an important starter.) If we want to flourish, we must do more than merely accept that other people are entitled to exist (this is the minimum required for individual liberty.) We must engage with others.
Flourishing at baseline, by the math, requires an energy situation that leaves at least some black ink. Wolves when the caribou migrate through. Lakota following the great herds.
I’ve lived in Amsterdam for nine years, and when I go back to my hometown in northern California, I get a similar feeling to what you describe. There’s so much more homelessness and drug paraphernalia, and grocery store prices are insane. My European Dream feels so much more alive. Here my son goes to a fantastic public school. We own a little house in a nice neighbourhood. Our inexpensive health insurance covers everything from physiotherapy to prescriptions to the 10-day hospital stay I had a couple of years ago. My daughter just finished her first year at University of Amsterdam, and tuition is €2K a year. The whole premise of society here is just so different.
Okay, so this triggered a sort of chain of thought that, if you will oblige me, I'd like to kinda flesh out bit.
Yes, this a lovely vision of life, one that is undergirded by the security umbrella of the American Empire. That free healthcare and cheap living and world-class infrastructure isn't possible if the Dutch have to finance and arrange for their own national security and defense.
Not a value judgement or a criticism at all. Just a passing thought that pops into my head when American expats extol the virtue of life "over there". The Americans have, in a very real sense, exported their prosperity to the peripheral client states at the edges of the empire. I myself lived in South Korea for several years in the early 2010's. It was a vibrant, dynamic, energetic, safe, well designed built environment with a lovely landscape and excellent outdoor recreation. None of which would be possible without the presence of 30,000 American troops and their attendant activities. And yet, the young people of that nation have chosen to...commit a sort of ethno-national suicide, by refusing to build families within their current cultural context.
So there's something to that, the very urban built environment that I wish the United States would adopt, has resulted, when combined with cultural factors, in a people who are literally dying out, going extinct, by choice.
My return was similarly disconcerting to yours. Everything so sterile, bland, the beige sameness of all the towns and cities. Strip malls and oxy and fatness and garbage food. Nobody walks. It was so jarring, after spending 2 1/2 years on East Asian trains and buses and sidewalks. And the screens. We left the United States before widespread adoption of the smartphone, and returned into a very different world, a distracted people with increasingly tenuous grasp on physical reality beyond consumption.
Our solution was to retreat to a homestead on Southern Ohio, raises chickens and goats and apple trees. In retrospect this may have been the wrong answer to a problem we couldn't identify. 10 years later, course is set, and you have to do what you can with what you have where you are. We have a bearing orchard now, so we must commit ourselves to improving the place we are in rather than chasing some ethereal vision of goodness around the planet.
So, I dunno, when I experience and read about the virtues of life in other nations, these are the thoughts I have, about how those virtues are only possible by the sacrifice of the very people Chris happens upon in essays like this one.
At the end of the I kinda think it all boils down to Mouse Utopia.
It’s a really good point, Stephen. The American money injected through the Marshall Plan played a huge role in rebuilding Europe after WWII. And then American military might went a long way toward giving European social democracies the space and resources to focus on social programs rather than military buildup during the next several decades.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, European countries including the Netherlands are getting much more serious about defence spending, especially with the swing toward isolationism in some political quarters of the U.S. I’m very hopeful that with the foundation of wealth redistribution they’ve built here during these decades of American military superiority, these strong social democracies will be able to continue while also allocating significant resources to defence.
The gap here between rich and poor is much smaller than in the U.S., and infrastructure like public transport much more robust; also, people are generally content living in smaller spaces with less “stuff” (we haven’t owned a car in nine years, and we are four people and a dog in 800 square feet). So I think even with increased military spending the social safety net will persist. Perhaps the ramp up in European militaries will also take pressure off the U.S. and free up resources for social programs. I hope so!
Could the USA still protect other nations and create a more "healthy" than society? Like walkable cities, more variation in architecture, etc? Or does it need to be bland and unhealthy in order to keep it's overseas presence?
It's even worse than that - just imagine the mammoth scale of the cumulative defense subsidy over the 7-8 decades of "peace" since WWII. Let's severely underestimate it at 2% of GDP. That compounds to a relative GDP increase of 387% over that period. Europe should have space colonies, flying cars, the Jetsons, whatever. Instead they have good cheap wine and a lot of time off. I'm not even mentioning the vast pharmaceutical subsidy the US gives the world.
The US has outperformed economically by every measure. Europe has poured a mindboggling fortune into creature comforts and it shows. I don't blame Americans for moving there to reap the largesse coerced from hapless Americans by their rulers. But I can't help noticing that young Europeans who think they have potential tend to move to the US.
Chris I am incredibly thankful for your perspective and for your expansive nature which seems to have room for almost anybody (it reminds me of Christ). Maybe though, it’s time for you to pick up some Wendell Berry and discover the opposite side of reality, that is, the reality of place. Many of the problems you pick up here are problems of rootlessness (Simone Weil has a great little book on this), and maybe picking a small, forgotten place, where people are connected to the land and to each other, and sticking around for a few years (at the very least) might lend some perspective.
Yes. I thought the essay was powerful and very well written (thank you), but I also know there are small towns there that haven’t died, where people are connected to community. Try some towns in Minnesota, for instance, where there are still communities of German-Americans.
Also, if Caroline ever decides to go to community college, university, etc, this retired university prof is happy to give guidance. I hope the heck her lot improves, because she is a decent person with real potential.
Also, it made me think of these Syrian guys I've been interviewing, young men I met in a refugee camp in Bulgaria last year.
Would you believe they are the most cheerful, exuberant people you could ever meet? To everything, their response is "No problem. No problem." The second you get within a foot of them they're shoving espressos and cigarettes (and Red Bull: no thanks!) at you and laughing and joking and flirting and ribbing each other.
The main takeaway is that after what they've been through they're grateful to be alive, blah blah. But I think it's even more because they have these deep friendships rooted in shared experience and do everything in packs. They tell you their destination (Malta, Croatia, Britain) and their dream: New York or LA (American soft power, man). Imagine a person who's lost their whole family in a bomb strike in a war that started when they were children or some of them not born, have more hope for the future than Americans?
You'd think with everything they've been through, they'd live in a whiskey bottle but almost none drink. And it's because they're Muslim, but I suspect it's almost the literal meaning spirituality, as in full of spirit.
I think only immigrants can save America. But here we are, saying, "No thanks! We don't want brave, hardworking, optimistic people., they're rapists and terrorists."
I say this with respect, but it is truly astonishing that you got so much value from what Chris wrote, and yet your response to it was, "I guess we just need to bring in more immigrants", to make up for these destitute losers, I guess (who, we presume are at least some of the ones you say are referring to illegal immigrants as rapists and terrorists).
Somehow, you didn't even consider the fact that a significant factor in these people being in the downtrodden positions they're in could actually be a lack of good-paying jobs, in part because of cheaper foreign labor. Or the inflation of their cost of health care since their local hospital has to take care of medical care for people who weren't even born here and may have no stake in our community.
I think you should have a little respect for the subjects of this story. I believe in them. I believe they're just what we need, but they have to be given a chance, and they have to be able to count on their dollar to hold its value for more than 6 months.
Hi Chris, in my very limited experience the American Dream is alive and very healthy in immigrant communities who work very hard and manage to give themselves and their children a better life. That is an ever growing demographic. My direct experience, because I am a Spanish speaker, has been with the Latino community, but I have observed similar trends in other immigrant communities. All is them so share a cultural background where community and family is at the forefront. If you have not written about this already, would love your take on this.
As someone who has been involved in the international human rights movement for decades I love meeting folks with the spirit of Caroline. People who have often been terribly mistreated, or come from communities full of intense conflict. Yet, they display the kindness, resilience and strength we all need to hold onto each and every day.
I live in little India in a medium sized town and you are correct they have a different outlook but its not the American dream. They no longer necessarily view the west as somewhere to settle or put down roots. Its more transactional they're here to make money, and really nothing more . They're very nationalistic and very community oriented but that doesn't even extend to other Indians let alone 2nd/3rd gen Americans. I guess what I'm trying to put into words is that although they personally have community they have little interest in bettering America.
I would say this isn't consistent withmy experience of Indian immigrants. Nonetheless, if "they're here to make money, and really nothing more", that's pretty much the definition of the American Dream.
They reject Rooseveltian construction of the Hyphenated Americanism. They are not Americans from India, they are Indians in America. These result in two very, very different conceptions of communal obligation.
Now, I don't want to extrapolate anecdote to define an entire ethnic group, so take it for what it is, I suppose.
The question to ask is, if we went to war with India tomorrow, which uniform are you putting on? There's only one right answer.
That's certainly present in certain immigrant communities, especially ones from Western Europe and parts of South Asia and East Asia (although East Asian migration except China has basically ended)
"A decade ago I had hope that things were so bad that we couldn’t possibly keep ignoring the malaise, the emptiness, the ugliness, and we would move to right the ship. Instead we, including the policy class like me who have the influence and platform to change things, have buried our heads deeper into the sand, and moved to make life in the US even more banal and isolating, because we can’t grasp that the problem isn’t about the economic, but about the spiritual, isn’t about building another basic housing complex, another road, another shopping mall, but about building more cohesive and meaningful communities."
Ouch. From my observations in the policy class, they would generally fight battles about small irrelevancies while taking for granted the safety and security which they enjoy. Molly Ivins used to call this "Too many years, too many limousines", but at a high level I think more of it may be the lack of mixing between the classes--and also lowered community interaction in other forms like religious services etc.
There was a time when the millionaire owner of the local tool and die shop, or foundry, or whatever light industrial enterprise, lived in the same neighborhood as his employee, sent his kids to the same school, and was member of the same social clubs, went to the same church. This creates a sort of noblise oblige. Even if the guy was an asshole, he at least had to look people in the eye every day.
Walk any post industrial rustbelt town. Mansions on the same block as vernacular working class housing. Churches on every corner.
We no longer do this. We don't build places this way, and our elite class are not that sort of people anymore.
I was noodling on this a bit--many people blame "free trade", but as other folks have pointed out, it pre-dates much of the NAFTA and other issues. I think your description is living nearby ties well into a "skin-in-the-game" analogy. Even if Mr. Burns, richest man in Springfield is quite unpleasant, he still ensures that Homer et al have jobs.
I wonder how much of the mix of the Wal Mart effect, which cratered locally owned businesses and private equity/distant ownership have been the main contributors to the enshittification of the American experience vs "China makes everything and exports it like Japan did in the 80s". It's something to think about.
Agreed. Walmart obliterated entire economic segments in towns and cities all over the USA. Then you have ivory Tower economists bleating about "they can just retrain or they should just move away". The correct response to that is a slap in the face and asking them what exactly they should retrain as on a single or single digit industry town of 5,000 people where Walmart bankrupted three business and replaced a few dozen reasonably jobs with minimum wage jobs where you boss is hundreds of miles away in Arkansas.
Yep. Used to be a "rich man" had a two or maybe three story house, a Cadillac/Lincoln car and maybe a little sports car on the weekends and went on vacation in the summer AND the winter. His wife and kids were active in the community and he helped fund the local little league and Boy scouts.
That basically doesn't exist anymore outside of really small towns.
Jim, I agree. I chide myself for not getting up on Sunday mornings and visiting a different church every week, the more different: the better, and being open to any opportunity for meaningful conversation. Conversations that could ensue would at least be between individuals who value spirituality.
Mixing between the people who value spirituality in some form and sharing important parts of each other’s stories, would be helpful. I will try to make this my “Do something!”, as Michelle Obama said!
I wonder what you would find if you went to some places that weren’t so down and out? Just seems like you were doing a little self-selecting here. Flop house motels are going to have people of a certain lifestyle and level of learned helplessness. When you talk to people who are stuck in place for what ever reason, you will get a certain story. But considering the number of x-heroin addicts is less than .1% of the population, you are not getting a true cross section of the other 99.8% of the country, you know what I mean? It would be interesting to balance this by hearing from some people for whom the American dream is working. But, they are working, and so harder to run down, I suppose. Plus, you can order a fish sandwich with extra lettuce and tomato, hold the bun, at MacD’s. Or a turkey sausage, egg and cheese English muffin and a plain coffee at Dunkin Donuts. No one made you eat all that sugar. You had some choices there,too, you know?
lol. I am writing about what others eat, not me. And those are not healthy meals and if you think they are then I suggest you try some fresh authentic meals like most of the rest of the world eats.
Everything is relative. If you try to do the best you can with what is presented to you, that’s it, you are doing the best you can. I am not dissing those people you talked to- just saying it was sort of a skewed sample there. And a depressing read. A guy distancing himself from his addict family to stay heroin free is a good story in and of itself. It’s just not the story of the average American, you know? But four donuts, that was a bit much . Really, who eats for donuts, and then complains when they feel like crap? What did you think would happen? Not really judging tho-My donut consumption is scheduled, and anticipated, and limited to one every six days, the rate that keeps my AC1 at an acceptable level. You write well, sorry for being cranky.
Chris - it’s a vast world, and I do feel like you go straight for the derelicts, eat garbage food and then get discouraged. Reminds me of your walking trip through Phoenix.
Please keep walking around America. McDonald’s has gone way downhill since the pandemic, with screens replacing people, but visit better places. It’s not the Mickey D’s of 2016. Think fast casual restaurants like Chipotle. I would love to get your perspective on this land. Talk to the middle class not the under class.
A fish sandwich at McDonalds is a better choice but hardly nutritious, for your body or your soul. And although we all have the ability to choose, it seems the point of the writing is that cultural influence has led us Americans to be conditioned to choose a lifestyle of sedentary, junk eating, isolated, depressed people. And that is hard to deny for the majority of Americans, no?
What is nutritious is a home cooked meal eaten with people you love followed by a stroll through your neighborhood. I will say there is much more optimism in my suburban experience but a lot is still missing and the drug is alcohol rather than heroin.
Ok on my way to Panera, which is McDonalds for the upper middle class because I’m bored alone at home. So American.
I've been road-tripping America for over 40 years — I'm 58 now — and everything you write rings true. It's so sad to drive through so many once-healthy towns and small cities that now feel literally gutted and carved out, only skeletons now, anything good destroyed or sold off or ground down.
Most winters, when the winter is too much for me at my home in West Virginia, I do a long journey across the southern US. I have a few personal rules for these journeys: camp out as much as possible (I have a compact van set up for this); always eat at small, cheap, local restaurants; avoid freeways and highways as much as possible; actively search for some sort of local culture, even if it's just the karaoke night at the dive bar; stay in a place for a few days, rather than just overnight; talk with local people, and try to understand the place as it is.
Implied in all these rules is a choice I make to avoid the hooks that lead to the death spiral of corporate "culture," and those who've been sucked into it. At the same time, there's a tricky balance in also avoiding the "discovered" small towns and cities which are tending towards the other hand that pushes towards corporatization: that of gentrifying real estate developers and arts-entrepreneurs seeking the next Silicon Whatever. Luckily, I've lived in a few of these places for enough time to be able to recognize them when I see them.
I know I can't change the sad situation of our American nightmare, nor the mind of anyone stuck in it. Honestly, the so-called "dream" has never felt anything but propaganda to me. I don't really even believe in progress anymore, in terms of wide-scale social change. I understand that I am actively avoiding what you might call "real" America, though I would call it corporatized America. But I've found it's quite possible to come across "bubbles" of places that seem to be socially (& physically) healthy, whose residents are creative and inventive and love their place, and who can take in a temporary resident like me for a few nights and show me around. That restores me.
What you are finding is America too, but places where there has either been resistance to corporate development, or the places are off the corporate radar because they're too small to be profitable.
Town planners can limit corporate growth but many welcome it as a way of legitimizing their little hole in the wall.
You sideswiped my neck of the woods in east central Ohio, and spending most of yesterday in the courthouse, the hearings I attended and hallway conversations would track with your statements here. But I thank you immensely for the introduction to Caroline. She's around here, too.
I’ve practiced criminal defense in a variety of communities: small town Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, and Philly, and I’ve learned that every type of American community has its underclass if people that are basically ground to dust in order for the rest of us to extract what little they have so that we can live cushy lives.
My husband and I have driven across the U.S. multiple times over 37 years and it is true things have changed and not necessarily for the better. The downtowns have died in many places which takes with them what makes a town unique. But, we still enjoyed our most recent trip New York to Washington State 4 years ago. We stay off interstates as much as possible and pick small (cheap) places to stay. Our drive was beautiful and we found quite a few nice towns, bookstores, parks. As for food, we go to grocery stores. You can get bread, cheese, avocados, fruit, nuts - you don’t have to eat Dunkin’ Donuts. For dinner, you’d be surprised how many coops there are in the most unexpected places. Most have prepared food that is healthy and good. I don’t disagree that America has issues. The homeless and drug situation is beyond ridiculous for such a wealthy country. It is fixable and a choice by powers that be not to fix it but I’m not sure comparing functional parts of other countries with the most dysfunctional parts of the U.S. is fair. I am currently sitting a Japanese Akita and the best advice I got is - you’ll love her as long as you don’t expect her to be a Labrador. They’re both lovely but each in their own way.
Yeah I love reading Chris' stuff but he's just flat-out wrong about food in the US. It's gotten better in the past decade, and *much* better in the past two decades. You can get good produce in grocery stories, lots of non-elite places have farmer's markets now, many restaurants serve stuff that isn't super-processed glop.
Now, this has happened alongside the further evolution of junk food culture, and if obesity stats are any guide, most people are choosing the the junk food. But it's really not so hard to find decent, wholesome food in most parts (not everywhere, but most parts) of the US these days.
I appreciate your vivid eye for the unglamorous and ordinary pain of people, and this is an especially moving depiction of the quiet brokenness resting through so much of US society. It didn't have to be this way, the absence of community you lament. America may have rugged individualism built into its DNA, but it also has had a strong tradition of voluntary community organizations that enriched their localities - Rotary, Lions, Scouting, community choirs, churches, and the like. Yet so much of that tradition has been lost and hollowed out, with COVID acting as an accelerant for an already existing process. I was just speaking with our church's volunteer coordinator, who has experience recruiting volunteers in a number of different organizations, and she was lamenting how difficult it is to get people of our generation (in our 30s) and younger to be willing to volunteer for anything. The oldest generation still puts in so much of the activity to actually make community events happen - once the Boomer generation dies off, so many of the pockets of community that still exist in this country will die off with them.
You lament that the policy class in the US haven't done more to build cohesive and meaningful communities. There's a lot that could be said on this front - although policy can make it easier or harder for organic community to emerge, it on its own can't compel one into being - but I think a big reason why more hasn't been done is a lack of trust. Where there isn't a bond of trust holding people together, community falls apart.
I keep returning to something a friend of mine, an American who serves as a missionary in Central Asia, once said about her experiences there. She said there was more solidarity among ordinary people there because they had no illusions that they had some democratic impact on government - the state was what it was. Your neighbors weren't to blame for its problems. It was up to everyone to help each other figure out how to navigate within and around that out-of-reach system. Whereas, in the US, everyone shares responsibility for the state because we elect its officials. When there's a problem with our country, it's the people who voted for the other guy who are to blame - if we could just get rid of them, we could get rid of the problems. We don't see the people around us as partners in a shared suffering to help each other endure, but as the primary obstacles to us living a fulfilling life. Since then, I've wondered if in some sense it's the democratic promise of America that makes this country harder to fix.
This feels unfair as a comparison. When you went to France or Uganda you didn't stick to the touristy areas but also didn't specifically seek out the most depressed areas like you did in the US.
Good point. If you had gone to a North African ghetto in Paris, you would have gotta a different response. If you had gone to the area of Uganda most damaged by the war, and not yet rehabilitated, you would have gotten a different response…
I think that much of this dreariness is a byproduct for evermore profit. Most of the resources in this country are vacuumed up and just enough to keep some Americans alive is allowed to remain available. Most everything from the government to nonprofits to businesses to the arts and sciences are captured and subverted, and when not exclusively grifts are repurposed to control the population.
Everything is ugly or falling apart because beauty or even quality is unprofitable. Just jam enough food and allow enough housing to keep the proles alive in the most **profitable** way. The government, brought and controlled by the corporations, both subsidized Big Agriculture via farm subsidies and allows the failure of the regulatory agencies to stop the mass poisoning of the population because of the political bribes/donations. The European governments do not allow their food makers to do what American food makers are allowed to do.
It has been an ongoing process for fifty years, which does not look to even slow down, but continue until nothing is left. The Worshipping of Money justified under Neoliberalism, not leftism, liberalism, or conservatism, is the ruling ideology of the United States of America or at least three generations slowly getting robbed and poisoned for profit.
I just realized that it was my generation for which The American Dream was both real and realistically possible. Of course, I am barely old enough to remember the Eagle’s landing on the Moon. Fuck me. What a nightmare.
"In the nine years since the last American Dream trip, I’ve come to realize I don’t like America, not as a place to live. We have an ugly, selfish, winner-take-all culture — devoid of community, meaning, and the majestic — and almost all our policy is built around the notion that individual liberty, with the most stuff at the cheapest price, is the ultimate good."
I appreciate you saying, maybe even admitting, this. The dark side of "individual liberty" presents as "every man for himself" - and that has been the ascendant feeling in a country that has minimal safety net, minimal family support, zero job security, and financial ruin seemingly always around the corner. The housing crisis of 08-09 likely exacerbated this dark side, as so many millions of people were kicked out of their houses - I think there was a collective, "wtf is this? why would a country let this happen?" Yet with no clear solutions or avenues for change as any collective support system is immediately branded socialism and people who would be open minded to it are browbeaten, propagandized, distracted into opposition.
Yes, there needs to be some kind of rise of spiritual and general life fulfillment, but I do not see how that can happen in a country wracked by economic insecurity and a feeling of precipice.
I've been working on articulating the difference between existing and flourishing as human beings. Existing just requires water, calories, and shelter. Flourishing requires other people to engage in our narrative (and by that I mean a lot more than just conversation, although conversation is an important starter.) If we want to flourish, we must do more than merely accept that other people are entitled to exist (this is the minimum required for individual liberty.) We must engage with others.
"difference between existing and flourishing as human beings" -- Wish I had used that line. Spot on!
Flourishing at baseline, by the math, requires an energy situation that leaves at least some black ink. Wolves when the caribou migrate through. Lakota following the great herds.
I’ve lived in Amsterdam for nine years, and when I go back to my hometown in northern California, I get a similar feeling to what you describe. There’s so much more homelessness and drug paraphernalia, and grocery store prices are insane. My European Dream feels so much more alive. Here my son goes to a fantastic public school. We own a little house in a nice neighbourhood. Our inexpensive health insurance covers everything from physiotherapy to prescriptions to the 10-day hospital stay I had a couple of years ago. My daughter just finished her first year at University of Amsterdam, and tuition is €2K a year. The whole premise of society here is just so different.
Okay, so this triggered a sort of chain of thought that, if you will oblige me, I'd like to kinda flesh out bit.
Yes, this a lovely vision of life, one that is undergirded by the security umbrella of the American Empire. That free healthcare and cheap living and world-class infrastructure isn't possible if the Dutch have to finance and arrange for their own national security and defense.
Not a value judgement or a criticism at all. Just a passing thought that pops into my head when American expats extol the virtue of life "over there". The Americans have, in a very real sense, exported their prosperity to the peripheral client states at the edges of the empire. I myself lived in South Korea for several years in the early 2010's. It was a vibrant, dynamic, energetic, safe, well designed built environment with a lovely landscape and excellent outdoor recreation. None of which would be possible without the presence of 30,000 American troops and their attendant activities. And yet, the young people of that nation have chosen to...commit a sort of ethno-national suicide, by refusing to build families within their current cultural context.
So there's something to that, the very urban built environment that I wish the United States would adopt, has resulted, when combined with cultural factors, in a people who are literally dying out, going extinct, by choice.
My return was similarly disconcerting to yours. Everything so sterile, bland, the beige sameness of all the towns and cities. Strip malls and oxy and fatness and garbage food. Nobody walks. It was so jarring, after spending 2 1/2 years on East Asian trains and buses and sidewalks. And the screens. We left the United States before widespread adoption of the smartphone, and returned into a very different world, a distracted people with increasingly tenuous grasp on physical reality beyond consumption.
Our solution was to retreat to a homestead on Southern Ohio, raises chickens and goats and apple trees. In retrospect this may have been the wrong answer to a problem we couldn't identify. 10 years later, course is set, and you have to do what you can with what you have where you are. We have a bearing orchard now, so we must commit ourselves to improving the place we are in rather than chasing some ethereal vision of goodness around the planet.
So, I dunno, when I experience and read about the virtues of life in other nations, these are the thoughts I have, about how those virtues are only possible by the sacrifice of the very people Chris happens upon in essays like this one.
At the end of the I kinda think it all boils down to Mouse Utopia.
Anyways, thank you for sparking this rant.
It’s a really good point, Stephen. The American money injected through the Marshall Plan played a huge role in rebuilding Europe after WWII. And then American military might went a long way toward giving European social democracies the space and resources to focus on social programs rather than military buildup during the next several decades.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, European countries including the Netherlands are getting much more serious about defence spending, especially with the swing toward isolationism in some political quarters of the U.S. I’m very hopeful that with the foundation of wealth redistribution they’ve built here during these decades of American military superiority, these strong social democracies will be able to continue while also allocating significant resources to defence.
The gap here between rich and poor is much smaller than in the U.S., and infrastructure like public transport much more robust; also, people are generally content living in smaller spaces with less “stuff” (we haven’t owned a car in nine years, and we are four people and a dog in 800 square feet). So I think even with increased military spending the social safety net will persist. Perhaps the ramp up in European militaries will also take pressure off the U.S. and free up resources for social programs. I hope so!
Could the USA still protect other nations and create a more "healthy" than society? Like walkable cities, more variation in architecture, etc? Or does it need to be bland and unhealthy in order to keep it's overseas presence?
The Netherlands is a small country that basically got to reboot after 1945 with American aid.
It's even worse than that - just imagine the mammoth scale of the cumulative defense subsidy over the 7-8 decades of "peace" since WWII. Let's severely underestimate it at 2% of GDP. That compounds to a relative GDP increase of 387% over that period. Europe should have space colonies, flying cars, the Jetsons, whatever. Instead they have good cheap wine and a lot of time off. I'm not even mentioning the vast pharmaceutical subsidy the US gives the world.
The US has outperformed economically by every measure. Europe has poured a mindboggling fortune into creature comforts and it shows. I don't blame Americans for moving there to reap the largesse coerced from hapless Americans by their rulers. But I can't help noticing that young Europeans who think they have potential tend to move to the US.
Chris I am incredibly thankful for your perspective and for your expansive nature which seems to have room for almost anybody (it reminds me of Christ). Maybe though, it’s time for you to pick up some Wendell Berry and discover the opposite side of reality, that is, the reality of place. Many of the problems you pick up here are problems of rootlessness (Simone Weil has a great little book on this), and maybe picking a small, forgotten place, where people are connected to the land and to each other, and sticking around for a few years (at the very least) might lend some perspective.
Yes. I thought the essay was powerful and very well written (thank you), but I also know there are small towns there that haven’t died, where people are connected to community. Try some towns in Minnesota, for instance, where there are still communities of German-Americans.
Also, if Caroline ever decides to go to community college, university, etc, this retired university prof is happy to give guidance. I hope the heck her lot improves, because she is a decent person with real potential.
+1 for Wendell Berry. Read 𝘏𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘢𝘩 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘦𝘳 and 𝘑𝘢𝘺𝘣𝘦𝘳 𝘊𝘳𝘰𝘸!
Yes!
Aww this made me cry.
Also, it made me think of these Syrian guys I've been interviewing, young men I met in a refugee camp in Bulgaria last year.
Would you believe they are the most cheerful, exuberant people you could ever meet? To everything, their response is "No problem. No problem." The second you get within a foot of them they're shoving espressos and cigarettes (and Red Bull: no thanks!) at you and laughing and joking and flirting and ribbing each other.
The main takeaway is that after what they've been through they're grateful to be alive, blah blah. But I think it's even more because they have these deep friendships rooted in shared experience and do everything in packs. They tell you their destination (Malta, Croatia, Britain) and their dream: New York or LA (American soft power, man). Imagine a person who's lost their whole family in a bomb strike in a war that started when they were children or some of them not born, have more hope for the future than Americans?
You'd think with everything they've been through, they'd live in a whiskey bottle but almost none drink. And it's because they're Muslim, but I suspect it's almost the literal meaning spirituality, as in full of spirit.
I think only immigrants can save America. But here we are, saying, "No thanks! We don't want brave, hardworking, optimistic people., they're rapists and terrorists."
I say this with respect, but it is truly astonishing that you got so much value from what Chris wrote, and yet your response to it was, "I guess we just need to bring in more immigrants", to make up for these destitute losers, I guess (who, we presume are at least some of the ones you say are referring to illegal immigrants as rapists and terrorists).
Somehow, you didn't even consider the fact that a significant factor in these people being in the downtrodden positions they're in could actually be a lack of good-paying jobs, in part because of cheaper foreign labor. Or the inflation of their cost of health care since their local hospital has to take care of medical care for people who weren't even born here and may have no stake in our community.
I think you should have a little respect for the subjects of this story. I believe in them. I believe they're just what we need, but they have to be given a chance, and they have to be able to count on their dollar to hold its value for more than 6 months.
Agreed. An increasing labor pool does drive down wages for low skilled jobs. Even certain higher skilled ones too.
Hi Chris, in my very limited experience the American Dream is alive and very healthy in immigrant communities who work very hard and manage to give themselves and their children a better life. That is an ever growing demographic. My direct experience, because I am a Spanish speaker, has been with the Latino community, but I have observed similar trends in other immigrant communities. All is them so share a cultural background where community and family is at the forefront. If you have not written about this already, would love your take on this.
Yes. The goal of this trip was to go to El Paso, my fav American city, because of that. I’ve written about this before
https://americancompass.org/immigrants-and-the-american-dream/
As someone who has been involved in the international human rights movement for decades I love meeting folks with the spirit of Caroline. People who have often been terribly mistreated, or come from communities full of intense conflict. Yet, they display the kindness, resilience and strength we all need to hold onto each and every day.
I'm not certain but I suspect if one wants to find people who still believe in the American Dream, one should start with the immigrant community.
I live in little India in a medium sized town and you are correct they have a different outlook but its not the American dream. They no longer necessarily view the west as somewhere to settle or put down roots. Its more transactional they're here to make money, and really nothing more . They're very nationalistic and very community oriented but that doesn't even extend to other Indians let alone 2nd/3rd gen Americans. I guess what I'm trying to put into words is that although they personally have community they have little interest in bettering America.
I would say this isn't consistent withmy experience of Indian immigrants. Nonetheless, if "they're here to make money, and really nothing more", that's pretty much the definition of the American Dream.
They reject Rooseveltian construction of the Hyphenated Americanism. They are not Americans from India, they are Indians in America. These result in two very, very different conceptions of communal obligation.
Now, I don't want to extrapolate anecdote to define an entire ethnic group, so take it for what it is, I suppose.
The question to ask is, if we went to war with India tomorrow, which uniform are you putting on? There's only one right answer.
Hehe a good % would join the Indian military
That's certainly present in certain immigrant communities, especially ones from Western Europe and parts of South Asia and East Asia (although East Asian migration except China has basically ended)
"A decade ago I had hope that things were so bad that we couldn’t possibly keep ignoring the malaise, the emptiness, the ugliness, and we would move to right the ship. Instead we, including the policy class like me who have the influence and platform to change things, have buried our heads deeper into the sand, and moved to make life in the US even more banal and isolating, because we can’t grasp that the problem isn’t about the economic, but about the spiritual, isn’t about building another basic housing complex, another road, another shopping mall, but about building more cohesive and meaningful communities."
Ouch. From my observations in the policy class, they would generally fight battles about small irrelevancies while taking for granted the safety and security which they enjoy. Molly Ivins used to call this "Too many years, too many limousines", but at a high level I think more of it may be the lack of mixing between the classes--and also lowered community interaction in other forms like religious services etc.
There was a time when the millionaire owner of the local tool and die shop, or foundry, or whatever light industrial enterprise, lived in the same neighborhood as his employee, sent his kids to the same school, and was member of the same social clubs, went to the same church. This creates a sort of noblise oblige. Even if the guy was an asshole, he at least had to look people in the eye every day.
Walk any post industrial rustbelt town. Mansions on the same block as vernacular working class housing. Churches on every corner.
We no longer do this. We don't build places this way, and our elite class are not that sort of people anymore.
I was noodling on this a bit--many people blame "free trade", but as other folks have pointed out, it pre-dates much of the NAFTA and other issues. I think your description is living nearby ties well into a "skin-in-the-game" analogy. Even if Mr. Burns, richest man in Springfield is quite unpleasant, he still ensures that Homer et al have jobs.
I wonder how much of the mix of the Wal Mart effect, which cratered locally owned businesses and private equity/distant ownership have been the main contributors to the enshittification of the American experience vs "China makes everything and exports it like Japan did in the 80s". It's something to think about.
Agreed. Walmart obliterated entire economic segments in towns and cities all over the USA. Then you have ivory Tower economists bleating about "they can just retrain or they should just move away". The correct response to that is a slap in the face and asking them what exactly they should retrain as on a single or single digit industry town of 5,000 people where Walmart bankrupted three business and replaced a few dozen reasonably jobs with minimum wage jobs where you boss is hundreds of miles away in Arkansas.
Yep. Used to be a "rich man" had a two or maybe three story house, a Cadillac/Lincoln car and maybe a little sports car on the weekends and went on vacation in the summer AND the winter. His wife and kids were active in the community and he helped fund the local little league and Boy scouts.
That basically doesn't exist anymore outside of really small towns.
Jim, I agree. I chide myself for not getting up on Sunday mornings and visiting a different church every week, the more different: the better, and being open to any opportunity for meaningful conversation. Conversations that could ensue would at least be between individuals who value spirituality.
Mixing between the people who value spirituality in some form and sharing important parts of each other’s stories, would be helpful. I will try to make this my “Do something!”, as Michelle Obama said!
I wonder what you would find if you went to some places that weren’t so down and out? Just seems like you were doing a little self-selecting here. Flop house motels are going to have people of a certain lifestyle and level of learned helplessness. When you talk to people who are stuck in place for what ever reason, you will get a certain story. But considering the number of x-heroin addicts is less than .1% of the population, you are not getting a true cross section of the other 99.8% of the country, you know what I mean? It would be interesting to balance this by hearing from some people for whom the American dream is working. But, they are working, and so harder to run down, I suppose. Plus, you can order a fish sandwich with extra lettuce and tomato, hold the bun, at MacD’s. Or a turkey sausage, egg and cheese English muffin and a plain coffee at Dunkin Donuts. No one made you eat all that sugar. You had some choices there,too, you know?
lol. I am writing about what others eat, not me. And those are not healthy meals and if you think they are then I suggest you try some fresh authentic meals like most of the rest of the world eats.
Everything is relative. If you try to do the best you can with what is presented to you, that’s it, you are doing the best you can. I am not dissing those people you talked to- just saying it was sort of a skewed sample there. And a depressing read. A guy distancing himself from his addict family to stay heroin free is a good story in and of itself. It’s just not the story of the average American, you know? But four donuts, that was a bit much . Really, who eats for donuts, and then complains when they feel like crap? What did you think would happen? Not really judging tho-My donut consumption is scheduled, and anticipated, and limited to one every six days, the rate that keeps my AC1 at an acceptable level. You write well, sorry for being cranky.
Chris - it’s a vast world, and I do feel like you go straight for the derelicts, eat garbage food and then get discouraged. Reminds me of your walking trip through Phoenix.
Please keep walking around America. McDonald’s has gone way downhill since the pandemic, with screens replacing people, but visit better places. It’s not the Mickey D’s of 2016. Think fast casual restaurants like Chipotle. I would love to get your perspective on this land. Talk to the middle class not the under class.
A fish sandwich at McDonalds is a better choice but hardly nutritious, for your body or your soul. And although we all have the ability to choose, it seems the point of the writing is that cultural influence has led us Americans to be conditioned to choose a lifestyle of sedentary, junk eating, isolated, depressed people. And that is hard to deny for the majority of Americans, no?
What is nutritious is a home cooked meal eaten with people you love followed by a stroll through your neighborhood. I will say there is much more optimism in my suburban experience but a lot is still missing and the drug is alcohol rather than heroin.
Ok on my way to Panera, which is McDonalds for the upper middle class because I’m bored alone at home. So American.
Yes, Pamela Braxton, “And the drug is alcohol rather than heroin…” and alcohol is everywhere!
I've been road-tripping America for over 40 years — I'm 58 now — and everything you write rings true. It's so sad to drive through so many once-healthy towns and small cities that now feel literally gutted and carved out, only skeletons now, anything good destroyed or sold off or ground down.
Most winters, when the winter is too much for me at my home in West Virginia, I do a long journey across the southern US. I have a few personal rules for these journeys: camp out as much as possible (I have a compact van set up for this); always eat at small, cheap, local restaurants; avoid freeways and highways as much as possible; actively search for some sort of local culture, even if it's just the karaoke night at the dive bar; stay in a place for a few days, rather than just overnight; talk with local people, and try to understand the place as it is.
Implied in all these rules is a choice I make to avoid the hooks that lead to the death spiral of corporate "culture," and those who've been sucked into it. At the same time, there's a tricky balance in also avoiding the "discovered" small towns and cities which are tending towards the other hand that pushes towards corporatization: that of gentrifying real estate developers and arts-entrepreneurs seeking the next Silicon Whatever. Luckily, I've lived in a few of these places for enough time to be able to recognize them when I see them.
I know I can't change the sad situation of our American nightmare, nor the mind of anyone stuck in it. Honestly, the so-called "dream" has never felt anything but propaganda to me. I don't really even believe in progress anymore, in terms of wide-scale social change. I understand that I am actively avoiding what you might call "real" America, though I would call it corporatized America. But I've found it's quite possible to come across "bubbles" of places that seem to be socially (& physically) healthy, whose residents are creative and inventive and love their place, and who can take in a temporary resident like me for a few nights and show me around. That restores me.
What you are finding is America too, but places where there has either been resistance to corporate development, or the places are off the corporate radar because they're too small to be profitable.
Town planners can limit corporate growth but many welcome it as a way of legitimizing their little hole in the wall.
You sideswiped my neck of the woods in east central Ohio, and spending most of yesterday in the courthouse, the hearings I attended and hallway conversations would track with your statements here. But I thank you immensely for the introduction to Caroline. She's around here, too.
Thanks Jeff. And yes, I'm very glad I met Caroline and I hope (and pray) she finds something better than she has now.
I’ve practiced criminal defense in a variety of communities: small town Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, and Philly, and I’ve learned that every type of American community has its underclass if people that are basically ground to dust in order for the rest of us to extract what little they have so that we can live cushy lives.
My husband and I have driven across the U.S. multiple times over 37 years and it is true things have changed and not necessarily for the better. The downtowns have died in many places which takes with them what makes a town unique. But, we still enjoyed our most recent trip New York to Washington State 4 years ago. We stay off interstates as much as possible and pick small (cheap) places to stay. Our drive was beautiful and we found quite a few nice towns, bookstores, parks. As for food, we go to grocery stores. You can get bread, cheese, avocados, fruit, nuts - you don’t have to eat Dunkin’ Donuts. For dinner, you’d be surprised how many coops there are in the most unexpected places. Most have prepared food that is healthy and good. I don’t disagree that America has issues. The homeless and drug situation is beyond ridiculous for such a wealthy country. It is fixable and a choice by powers that be not to fix it but I’m not sure comparing functional parts of other countries with the most dysfunctional parts of the U.S. is fair. I am currently sitting a Japanese Akita and the best advice I got is - you’ll love her as long as you don’t expect her to be a Labrador. They’re both lovely but each in their own way.
Yeah I love reading Chris' stuff but he's just flat-out wrong about food in the US. It's gotten better in the past decade, and *much* better in the past two decades. You can get good produce in grocery stories, lots of non-elite places have farmer's markets now, many restaurants serve stuff that isn't super-processed glop.
Now, this has happened alongside the further evolution of junk food culture, and if obesity stats are any guide, most people are choosing the the junk food. But it's really not so hard to find decent, wholesome food in most parts (not everywhere, but most parts) of the US these days.
Agreed
I appreciate your vivid eye for the unglamorous and ordinary pain of people, and this is an especially moving depiction of the quiet brokenness resting through so much of US society. It didn't have to be this way, the absence of community you lament. America may have rugged individualism built into its DNA, but it also has had a strong tradition of voluntary community organizations that enriched their localities - Rotary, Lions, Scouting, community choirs, churches, and the like. Yet so much of that tradition has been lost and hollowed out, with COVID acting as an accelerant for an already existing process. I was just speaking with our church's volunteer coordinator, who has experience recruiting volunteers in a number of different organizations, and she was lamenting how difficult it is to get people of our generation (in our 30s) and younger to be willing to volunteer for anything. The oldest generation still puts in so much of the activity to actually make community events happen - once the Boomer generation dies off, so many of the pockets of community that still exist in this country will die off with them.
You lament that the policy class in the US haven't done more to build cohesive and meaningful communities. There's a lot that could be said on this front - although policy can make it easier or harder for organic community to emerge, it on its own can't compel one into being - but I think a big reason why more hasn't been done is a lack of trust. Where there isn't a bond of trust holding people together, community falls apart.
I keep returning to something a friend of mine, an American who serves as a missionary in Central Asia, once said about her experiences there. She said there was more solidarity among ordinary people there because they had no illusions that they had some democratic impact on government - the state was what it was. Your neighbors weren't to blame for its problems. It was up to everyone to help each other figure out how to navigate within and around that out-of-reach system. Whereas, in the US, everyone shares responsibility for the state because we elect its officials. When there's a problem with our country, it's the people who voted for the other guy who are to blame - if we could just get rid of them, we could get rid of the problems. We don't see the people around us as partners in a shared suffering to help each other endure, but as the primary obstacles to us living a fulfilling life. Since then, I've wondered if in some sense it's the democratic promise of America that makes this country harder to fix.
This feels unfair as a comparison. When you went to France or Uganda you didn't stick to the touristy areas but also didn't specifically seek out the most depressed areas like you did in the US.
Good point. If you had gone to a North African ghetto in Paris, you would have gotta a different response. If you had gone to the area of Uganda most damaged by the war, and not yet rehabilitated, you would have gotten a different response…
I think that much of this dreariness is a byproduct for evermore profit. Most of the resources in this country are vacuumed up and just enough to keep some Americans alive is allowed to remain available. Most everything from the government to nonprofits to businesses to the arts and sciences are captured and subverted, and when not exclusively grifts are repurposed to control the population.
Everything is ugly or falling apart because beauty or even quality is unprofitable. Just jam enough food and allow enough housing to keep the proles alive in the most **profitable** way. The government, brought and controlled by the corporations, both subsidized Big Agriculture via farm subsidies and allows the failure of the regulatory agencies to stop the mass poisoning of the population because of the political bribes/donations. The European governments do not allow their food makers to do what American food makers are allowed to do.
It has been an ongoing process for fifty years, which does not look to even slow down, but continue until nothing is left. The Worshipping of Money justified under Neoliberalism, not leftism, liberalism, or conservatism, is the ruling ideology of the United States of America or at least three generations slowly getting robbed and poisoned for profit.
I just realized that it was my generation for which The American Dream was both real and realistically possible. Of course, I am barely old enough to remember the Eagle’s landing on the Moon. Fuck me. What a nightmare.
"In the nine years since the last American Dream trip, I’ve come to realize I don’t like America, not as a place to live. We have an ugly, selfish, winner-take-all culture — devoid of community, meaning, and the majestic — and almost all our policy is built around the notion that individual liberty, with the most stuff at the cheapest price, is the ultimate good."
I appreciate you saying, maybe even admitting, this. The dark side of "individual liberty" presents as "every man for himself" - and that has been the ascendant feeling in a country that has minimal safety net, minimal family support, zero job security, and financial ruin seemingly always around the corner. The housing crisis of 08-09 likely exacerbated this dark side, as so many millions of people were kicked out of their houses - I think there was a collective, "wtf is this? why would a country let this happen?" Yet with no clear solutions or avenues for change as any collective support system is immediately branded socialism and people who would be open minded to it are browbeaten, propagandized, distracted into opposition.
Yes, there needs to be some kind of rise of spiritual and general life fulfillment, but I do not see how that can happen in a country wracked by economic insecurity and a feeling of precipice.
True that