The Transformation of the American Dream into the American Nightmare

If you haven't seen the movie that is referenced in the opening of this article, you really should!

In the movie Moscow on the Hudson (1984) Vladimir Ivanoff, a frustrated jazz musician living in the overregulated and dysfunctional USSR escapes to New York City, only to be initially bewildered and then angered by the chaotic freedom he sees around him. Eventually Ivanoff comes to realize that America is not a utopia, but rather a society in which you are free to be responsible for your own happiness.

The contrast between the film's vision of a repressive and corrupt Moscow, where there are laws for everything, yet everyone lives outside the law because everything you want requires going outside the system, and its vision of New York City, where there seem to be virtually no laws for anything, but yet everything you could want is available if you can find a way to get it-- aptly marks the contrast between the planned and the unplanned society.

That contrast once lay at the heart of the American Dream, of a country where you have the freedom to achieve anything if you strive for it. But while the rhetoric of the American Dream is used just as often by politicians, it has come to mean something else nowadays, namely government subsidized goodies to help you "realize" the American Dream. This subtle distinction has transformed the American Dream from one of individualistic independence, to one of government dependency.

The Democrats promise that if we give them power, they will rule with a level of fairness that we ourselves are not capable of. And when they have looted all the treasury, and have their mobs to bay for anyone's blood who questions them, when there is a law and a rule for everything, but no one obeys them if they can get away with it, when there is a smiling tyrant on every wall offering us a tenth of our own income back in government coupons... then we will truly be a progressive society that any student of history would recognize.

The American Dream is not a mere dream of commerce, but a dream of freedom. Freedom in labor, freedom in industry, freedom in thought and speech, and freedom of association. That is the American Dream we are fighting for. That is the American Dream that the left is fighting against. We can best defeat the left by offering the American Dream as the antidote to the American Nightmare.

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