The American dream was stolen long before Trump

New Indian Express

3 days ago

Even within the US, people have long felt that the American dream has been 'stolen' because wealth distribution in the past half-century has become skewed. A minuscule percentage of Wall Street, Ivy League and Silicon Valley types are accused of having rigged the system. They argue that between the 1950s and the 1970s, the American dream had created 'shared prosperity' and expanded the middle class. In 2012, Pulitzer-winning journalist Hedrick Smith even wrote a bestseller titled Who stole the American dream? Philosophers like Michael Sandel at Harvard have also questioned the meritocratic system—an inevitable component of the dream.
Historians and commentators have seen the 1970s as a decade of transition in the US when parts of the powerful American establishment started rethinking its welfarist idealism of the 1950s through the 1960s. They were plotting to impart a harder pro-business, laissez faire identity to the nation. This put the 'share-the-wealth ethic' under a cloud and aided the burglary of the American dream, eventually. From being an 'empire of production', it started moving towards becoming an empress of consumption. The loss of jobs argument that began then haunts America to this day.
In India, of course, the 1970s was the reverse. The Nehruvian-socialist dream had taken a crude turn. We were into nationalisation of nearly everything. The state was the final arbiter of nearly everything from industrial licences to prescribing the size of the family that one should raise. The Emergency was a part of this authoritarian micro-management of a nation's destiny. India's middle-class expansion came late, only in the 1990s. That is when we borrowed the American dream that was already in a crisis.
Even during the 1950s and 1960s America, although one section imagined the full bloom of the American dream, racial inequalities and segregation ensured the dream was a truncated, one-dimensional affair that cleverly brushed everything that disturbed the formulation under the carpet.
Those who dreamt the American dream when the first waves of big immigration happened from India, notoriously labelled the 'brain drain', constructed the dream very differently. Economist J N Bhagwati even spoke of a 'brain drain tax'. They did not abandon their motherland, but had a constructive narrative that was about scouting for technology, enterprise and education to take back. Interestingly, rural development was a running theme among the conscientious who had migrated in the 1960s and 1970s.
All this, of course, changed in the mid-1980s when a new generation of Indian-Americans, quite naturally, grew independent of their obligations back home. Assimilation in American society became a far greater pull. In the next few decades, India became an important member of the global technology network. For Indians, the American dream changed yet again. The diaspora perhaps imagined that the 'brown' had escaped the humiliations of the 'black' and had found a seat at the high table of American destiny. They had become an aspirational class of power and influence back in India, which had become a back office for the American dream.
Sugata Srinivasaraju | Senior journalist and author of The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
(Views are personal)
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