Standing by the recently fallen Berlin Wall, I felt what everyone else felt in those heady days: America won.
It had been a mere three years since US president Ronald Reagan stood right there, by the war-scarred Brandenburg Gate, and commanded the Soviet Union’s leader: “Tear down this wall!” Now the wall’s ruins were awash with the American gospel’s every sunray: the political conviction, the economic promise, the cultural leadership, and the moral vow.
That was in July 1990. Now, as the US celebrates its 250th birthday, the American dream is threatened as it has not been since the Civil War.
The American dream was first and foremost material. Yes, the Mayflower’s Pilgrims were driven by idealism, but most of the millions who crossed the Atlantic sought better livelihoods than their previous lots.
It took the struggle for independence to turn freedom into the American dream’s central theme. The British king, said the Declaration of Independence, is “marked by every act which may define a Tyrant,” and that is why he is “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
The American gospels of prosperity and freedom were later joined by the cultural engine the American people built and the political beacon that their government became.
Culturally, America became a wellspring of creativity that gave the world major inventions – from the light bulb and the microchip to the airplane and the spaceship – as well as the world’s most fertile universities and most powerful press.
These pillars shouldered the American republic’s golden dome, the moral leadership it radiated worldwide. Dissidents from Argentina to China looked up to the humane government that championed their struggles for freedom.
American imperfections conquered through success
Yes, the American effort was far from perfect. Soviet dissidents enjoyed American support, but their peers in countries like Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt did not. Even so, the aim, even when compromised, was clear. America wanted a free world and saluted freedom’s warriors.
And, yes, the American dream had setbacks. The Old South confronted it, and the Civil War nearly killed it.
In the American South, not all humans were equal, and the Land of the Free was inhabited by 3.5 million slaves. Economically, too, the Southerners defied the American dream, expecting to prosper without working, as landowners living off of unfree laborers’ unpaid work.
Even so, the American gospel proved more powerful than its enemies, as the dreamers went to a bloody war with the American dream’s saboteurs. When that war was over, America stood for freedom, equality, justice, and self-reliance, even if their pursuit was often inconsistent.
The American dream’s victory in the Civil War was so powerful that it began journeying abroad.
America defeated monarchism in World War I, fascism in World War II, and Communism in the subsequent Cold War. Now, with the Berlin Wall fallen, dozens of previously authoritarian countries were holding free elections and liberating their economies, all the while seeking Uncle Sam’s favor, guidance, and approval.
And then, in 2016, the American dream was suddenly challenged again, this time from within, and from above.
The retreat from the American dream did not happen overnight, and hopefully will never reach its destination. Still, as the Land of the Free prepares to bask in its 250th birthday’s fireworks, the American dream faces an unprecedented pincer attack from Right and Left.
No, there is no return to the American South’s racial supremacism, not to mention slavery or secessionism. There is, however, a massive attack on the American democracy’s pillars, on the judiciary, the media, and the principle of separation of powers. And the attack is coming from the American republic’s leadership itself.
In their reelection of the man who launched the retreat, 77 million Americans effectively endorsed a mob’s assault on Capitol Hill, and their candidate’s lie that the election he had lost was fraudulent.
Moreover, these voters’ America no longer believes in spreading the American dream of free people and free trade. In fact, it actively obstructs these American ideals. That is why in one country, Venezuela, this un-American America dethroned one autocracy only to install another, and that is why in another country, Iran, this un-American America legitimizes a regime that slew thousands as they demanded the same freedom that the American dream is all about.
And in the same spirit, the America that once stood for free trade now waged war on free trade, arbitrarily imposing tariffs on scores of trade partners, confusing those who obstructed fair trade with those who did not.
This is not the America that the world looked up to, the America that fought oppression, cultivated the freedoms of association, speech, and research, and launched the Marshall Plan that rebuilt a war-ravaged world. Two-and-a-half centuries after America’s founders rebuked tyranny, their successors waltz with tyrants, ram the courts, manipulate commerce, and harass the press.
And while this flank of America’s leadership flirts with fascistic ghosts, its other part tangoes with Communism’s spooks. What began with 1,114,184 New Yorkers electing as mayor a jihadist demagogue who promised free public transport and cheap housing through socialist price controls has just spread to the elections of his allies as congressional candidates.
The American dream is thus coming to be challenged from the Left as brazenly, idiotically, and fatefully as Trumpism challenges it from the Right.
Is this but a temporary crisis that the American dream will defeat the way it defeated slavery, monarchism, fascism, and Communism, or is this the beginning of a grand decline?
Middle Israelis wish they had an answer to this perplexing question; they wish they didn’t have to ask where the hell America is headed; and they wish a happy Fourth of July for the America they admired all their days, thanked all their nights, and loved all their lives.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the Hebrew bestseller The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.