Americans want their government to help revive the American Dream that helped the Baby Boomers, Donald Trump told Elon Musk in their August 12 conversation on X.
“It’s about the American dream,” Trump told Musk. “You don’t hear about the American dream anymore, Elon, you’re the American Dream in the truest sense, but you don’t hear about the American dream anymore.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
The American Dream hope for the future is rarely mentioned in the post-1990 government policy of enforced migration and chaotic diversity, slack wages, slumping living standards, and high housing costs.
The idea emerged in the early 1930s and then blossomed in the post-war prosperity made possible by low migration and rising productivity. Trump was born in 1946, so he grew up with the American Dream expectation of everyday prosperity.
The term was invented by American writer and historian James Truslow Adams, who described it as:
That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement … It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
The American Dream explainer echoed Trump’s August 7 comments on common sense and the downward slide of Americans’ confidence and expectations:
People want safety. They want security. They want respect all around the world for our country. They don’t want this horrible culture that is developing — a culture of no common sense [emphasis added]. It’s really a culture of no common sense, and it’s not what anyone wants.
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We want to have a safe country. We want to have a strong military. We want low interest rates, and we want to be able to have the American Dream. We want to be able to have our youth be able to buy homes, housing, get good jobs, and we’re really just at the opposite right now. So it’s so sad to see … [Harris has] been the worst border czar in history … [and] 20 million people came over the border during the Biden-Harris administration … Now you have people dying financially because they can’t buy bacon, they can’t buy food, they can’t buy groceries, they can’t do anything, and they’re living horribly in our country right now.
The dream of American prosperity and growth survived in many foreign countries while it was furiously attacked in the United States by business-backed progressives. They used their influence in U.S. K-12 schools and universities to push the alternative government-centered vision of civil rights and diversities in a “nation of immigrants.” This shift is exemplified by the establishment’s current celebration of illegal migrants as “Dreamers.”
Musk, who was born in South Africa in 1971, grew up with the expectation of an American Dream. “It always seemed like when there was cool technology or things happening, it was kind of in the United States,” Musk told an interviewer in 2012. “So, my goal as a kid was to get to get to America.”
Americans “want the American Dream back,” Musk told Trump:
People in America wanna feel excited and inspired about the future. They want to feel like the future is going be better than the past, and that America is going do things that are greater than we’ve done in the past, [to] reach new heights that make you proud to be an American and excited about the future.
Trump explained how he would try to restore the American Dream:
We’re going to give incentive to companies to come into our country, not to leave our country. We’re going to be giving tremendous incentives. We want companies to build here, not to build in other locations, and we want to create jobs.
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People, they need that incentive to go out and do it and they’re going to love their lives. I mean, they’re going to look forward to getting up in the morning and going to a job that they love, not a job that they can’t stand, or not any job at all where they have no money, where they literally have no money.
Americans’ prosperity grew rapidly after World War II, often allowing the Baby Boomer generation’s families to have several children and a decent house on a single income.
But wage growth stalled after Congress restarted immigration in 1965 and doubled it in 1990. The wealth shift was accelerated as high-productivity manufacturing jobs were exported from the 1990s, ensuring that younger American families got a smaller and smaller share of the nation’s new wealth compared to their Baby Boomer parents and politicians.
Trump slowed the process from 1916 to 1920, allowing wages to rise.
But the establishment turbocharged the process by helping elect President Joe Biden in 2020. Since 2021, Biden’s border chief accepted 10 million migrants in just three years, with the tacit approval of Vice President Kamala Harris. The ruthless policy of extraction migration fueled inflation, spiked housing costs, and stalled wages as it also shifted wealth to CEOs, older investors, and the Baby Boom generation.