The American Dream in the 21st Century

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 6 Want Meets Necessity in the New American Dream John Zogby U TICA, NEW YORK, is not known as a trend-setting community . However, having lived there all my life and establishing a polling and research company, I found it a perfect place to see the evolving American Dream. Utica, located in Oneida County in the dead center of New York State, grew because of the Erie Canal and prospered as a mill town and later with factories owned by GE, Bendix, and other manufacturers. (Zogby International operates out of a former GE aerospace plant.) The job exodus began in the 1960s, and the population has dropped from one hundred thousand to the current sixty thousand. Here, we knew hard times before they became in vogue. Back in 1987, my wife, Kathy, and I began a study of hunger in Oneida County, using telephone and door-to-door interviews. We asked if anyone in the household had “not eaten any food in any twenty-fourhour period during the past year because of a lack of money.” The resulting 21 percent who said “yes” surprised us; but what really took us aback in a separate telephone sample of 800 was finding that 3.6 percent of people in households earning from $50,000 to $75,000 were in that group, as were 3.2 percent of those earning more than $75,000. Remember that this was during the 1980s, when those were solid middle-class incomes. These were mostly people who had lost higher-paying jobs and had to adjust to their new reality. They did not want to give up their homes 106 ■ John Zogby and still had to own cars. Their children still had the same needs. Food was the one trade-off. In 1990, one in seven people nationwide reported earning less than they once did. Now, it is more than one in four. Many Americans are now in their second or third generation of downward spiraling jobs. Places like Utica were indeed the trendsetters for the growing number of no-longer-booming communities. If the American Dream was all about money and material goods, then it should have been in trouble in Utica twenty years ago and wilting everywhere in the recession-cum-depression of 2008–2009. What I saw anecdotally in my hometown twenty years ago gave me a heads-up that the American Dream was not dying; it was just changing. Now, that is happening everywhere among Americans across all demographic groups. Uticans accepted years ago that the economy would never return to where it once was, and people internalized that. I saw Elisabeth KüblerRoss ’s stages of grief impacting an entire community: from shock, anger, despair, and resignation to an acceptance of diminished economic circumstances and an adjustment of what the good life might mean. However, one’s own economic outlook is just one piece of how people have redefined the American Dream. The shift has happened in far more prosperous places than Utica, well before the housing bubble burst and banks collapsed. Although most Americans remain active consumers , many have found the acquisitive life failing to meet fundamental human needs. That is the other and perhaps most important element of the new American Dream. It is frankly not what I expected when I set out to measure attitudes toward a concept so central to how people see themselves and their society. Years ago, when I first thought about a book on the topic, I anticipated data that would force me to paint a pessimistic picture of Americans. Instead, I found quite the opposite. Readers and reviewers of that book, The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, often come away believing I see the world through rose-colored glasses. That is not me. Remember, I grew up in a place that, in addition to having lost its economic mojo forty years ago, averages 207 cloudy days per year. My observations on the new American Dream are not about me. They are about the opinions voiced by thousands of people over a number of years of scientific polling. Want Meets Necessity in the New American Dream ■ 107 The New American Dream: Secular Spiritualism In 1998, I started to survey perceptions of the American Dream nationally . Did people believe it was possible for them and others to achieve? What did it mean to them? Was it material success or fulfillment in other ways? Do some people...