The American Dream
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experience in the suburbs and my realization that suburban sprawl forms the national character of America. Some people responded critically to what I wrote, saying — people are forced to move to suburbs because city life is too expensive. Yes, I agree. This is true in some cases, especially considering there are so few actual cities in America to begin with. But I think it goes deeper. The return to the suburbs is not just economic imperative for people, it’s also cultural and even ideological. It boils down to what a lot of Americans think a “good life” means.
And as this good life has become feasible to fewer and fewer Americans, maybe it’s time to rethink the concept.
From what I’ve been able to gather, the American ethos is rooted in a mix of privacy, freedom, and space. And I guess that makes a lot of sense for a frontier society. The idea that you got to have your private castle — a house to raise a family and to be self-sufficient nuclear unit — is at the centre of it all. To make it happen, the majority of Americans have to be trapped in the corporate world — in what Chomsky refers to as private tyrannies. How else can you afford a mortgage, car payments, and insurance, and have access to at least some sort of health care for your family? This way of life is described as freedom. Something to aspire to.
I know the American Dream has been a stale concept people have been harping on for a long time and I’m not sure how many Americans my age find it relevant post-financial crush of 2008. But it turned out that many still do…and judging by the fast growing city transplant population to the upstate suburb world — homeownership and nuclear family life is still what most people want here once they spawn.
Yes, you can say the rents in the city are exuberantly high and the cost of apartments as well — but for majority of people it’s not the only issue. What pushes them is this desire to replicate their own childhood and provide “safety” and “good schooling” to their kids. They also seem to need “space” to keep their “stuff” in. And by space I don’t mean a two-bedroom apartment — but a house with multiple bedrooms filed to the brim with stuff, a backyard, garage… Many put their own private kids’ playground in the backyard, thus making it basically unnecessary to leave the house and socialize and the kid becomes a king of his own castle as well.
The idea of the necessity of such privacy and space for a happy childhood is perplexing to me. Most kids seem to be still interested in various people unlike their parents and are happy at a public playground, where they can meet and play with all kind of kids. They don’t need their own swings at home or their own slides. They do want a community, a proverbial village to raise them — and the suburbs is nothing but a fake sense of community — maintained by the fact that they’re usually populated by people in similar earning brackets. People are all very similar but there is no real kinship.
Recently a friend who is raising her kid in the city told me her son always wants to go to the playgrounds in other people backyards — not getting the concept of “private” if they visit their friends in the suburb. My daughter did that, too, when she saw the playground our neighbors have. Kids don’t get idea of private property unless you instill it in them. And I’m convinced this seemingly apolitical just common sense way to raise a family here is actually hard core indoctrination — indoctrination through living in the suburbs that instills a fear of other people, suspicion, caution, and a lack of curiosity and empathy for the proverbial other.
When we got stuck in LA during the pandemic, our “liberal community” of Los Feliz on next door — the people who who had BLM and "immigrants welcome” signs on their lawns — would routinely post photos of POCs walking by or stopping by their house. To them all non-white outsiders were potentially “suspicious”, potentially “casing” their house. These lovely humane liberals would profile them, post pictures, and act like undercover cops. On paper they are against police brutality and racial profiling. But if a black person lingers next to their house, they are ready to call the cops pronto. As Jarvis Coker wrote in Running the World, “in theory I respect your right to exist, I will kill you if you move next to me.” This behavior encapsulates the suburban ethos.
The idea of democracy and prosperity-for-all made America a number one country post-WW2 and the most desirable destination for immigrants who flocked here by the millions, buying into the American dream — aka house ownership. And it seems that people are not allowed to admit to themselves that even when it was more feasible and affordable than it is now, it never make them happy anyway — at least not all of them by default. I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of subreddits devoted to the suburbs and there are quite many disaffected Americans and immigrants reporting their hate of the suburban life that they can’t escape. Here is a success story. Other comments are much bleaker…
“My parents are immigrants from Asia and they bought into a suburb because suburbs generally have better school districts. A big house also conveys status ("becoming American" in a sense) and is a good investment they can use to build generational wealth. Asian households also are usually multigenerational and suburban houses give you more square footage to house a big family. I'm not a big fan of suburbs. They're inconvenient, socially dead, and really boring. But w/e at least my parents are living the American dream stuck in traffic for 2 hrs/day in a gas guzzling SUV and having a huge yard they never have time to enjoy.”
What I increasingly realize is that home ownership gives people enough of an illusion of having a functional democracy where anyone with enough hard work can join the ownership class and create wealth for the next generation. In reality, America is an oligarchy just like, and really no better than, Russia — where inequality is huge and where really rich don’t live in the suburbs but split time between places. They own not only houses but apartments, yachts, etc. And they actually have freedom and they actually own their houses without the fear of losing them any moment they can’t make mortgage payments. And the sheer fact of you owning a house — by owning I mean being able to pay the mortgage to the bank for now — doesn’t make you just like them.
You are an indentured serf with no tangible freedom, and the fact that you have “space” — some ugly cookie cutter building to fill with your “stuff” — doesn’t change this fact. And your ability to live in a homogenous PMC neighborhood with access to a good aka mostly white school for your kids only obscures your very low quality of life: the need to drive everywhere, to be sedentary, to be lonely, to imprison your kid in a house with no autonomy.
Quality of life I believe is having free time, friends, the ability to walk on the sidewalk — not having to run on a treadmill for an hour before work in a depressing suburban body maintenance space aka gym to make sure your body doesn’t melt into your car seat.
Maybe the American mental health epidemic is not due to brain chemistry being out of wack, but because this life is full of stress, anxiety and anomie. You can get twisted because of this social isolation, and I also started feeling it with the extreme quietness of the suburbs and increasing paranoia towards any noises from outside…getting suspicious of any person walking by at an odd hour.
Women here, admittedly, are having it so much better — and they have no idea of their privilege it seems. Women at least have an opportunity and lack of stigma to not have to work and to spend more time with their kids and to hang out with other moms. While middle class men in the suburbs, once they are fathers, become one dimensional creatures — making money, maintaining their body from utter deterioration at the gym, and spending all their free time on the weekends at home with their family. And this is a success story!
Now that I’ve lived in the suburbs (to be fair the least suburban suburb you can imagine) and have seen what life is like here, I think this letter published in the American Conservative a few years ago titled “Male Loneliness In Suburbia” captures the sentiment well —
“If this is "white privilege," screw it. I stopped by the shoe repair shop a couple of weeks ago, and there were some black guys my age sitting around talking and laughing with each other. I envied them. I probably make 10 or 15 times more than them, but they are probably rich in ways that I used to be before”
Are Americans afraid to say it as is — that the king is naked or are they so brainwashed that they don’t actually notice there is something really rotten about this situation?
I don’t say this to gloat, but I really do think that Americans might be the most brainwashed people I’ve met — precisely because they don’t doubt things too much and accept that everything should be as it is. And they are convinced that it’s much worse in other countries and that their suburban life full of “privacy” and “freedom” is the pinnacle of human achievement. And there are plenty of weaponized immigrants in the media class deployed to confirm people’s biases and help maintain the illusion that there can be no better life than in the suburban United States. (Yasha and I talked about one such media personality: Konstantin Kisin. But there are many others…)
It’s fascinating that Ilf and Petrov, two Soviet satirical writers, after traveling across America in 1935, wrote an insightful and funny anthropological book One-storied America — or Little Golden America, as it’s usually translated into English — that is still relevant today. They got to experience America at the height of the Great Depression and what they produced wasn’t simplistic anti-American propaganda, as you might expect from the Soviet writers under Stalin’s rule. In the book, Ilf and Petrov praise the industrious and hard working Americans they meet on their way and they are in awe of the efficiency of American life and the technological know-how that was way ahead of the USSR. But they also notice how antithetical thinking and curiosity is to the average American…anything that is beyond practical scope of their interests doesn’t seem to concern people here.
Americans like to watch movies, but don’t read. Money is the main goal to aspire to. Churches are the only places that help the poor. The girls in Hollywood are very pretty but have “mean eyes.” These are some of their observations that come to mind, even though I haven’t reread the book in a long time. I believe Ilf and Petrov’s perspective is so refreshing because it lacks the usual obsequiousness towards America that Russians, especially Soviet and post-Soviet immigrants, have. I definitely had this obsequiousness and cultural inferiority ingrained in me as well, and it took years to dismantle it.
In my experience — almost a hundred years after Ilf and Petrov’s — it is true that American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. People don’t really read or think, unless it is their job to do so — I mean unless they work in academia. Critical thinking and expanding your intellect is not part of the American Dream. The dream is owning a house…the dream is to remodel it in a way that perfectly fits you, to have the best Italian marble counter top in the kitchen. And for that you don’t need to read anything but Architectural Digest and Home Improvement Guides.
America is a tragic place with really mediocre culture that was lucky to become a major empire in the last 70 years with rapid technological advancement and it could attract the talent and brain from all over the world that made this places so vital — but it seems maybe the stagnation — or as in the Soviet Union it was called zastoi — is onto the US and the Perestroika or even Collapse might be looming in the future?
The huge swath of so called middle class seems to still believe in the idea sold to them by politicians that they have freedom of choice. But as George Carlin said in his last comedy special “Life is Worth Losing” twenty years ago — “you have no freedom of choice, you have owners, they got you by the balls — they don’t want population capable of critical thinking — they don’t want people smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly the are fucked by the system — they want obedient workers who are smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and dumb enough to passively accept the increasingly shitty jobs.” I believe Carlin was and is spot on — Americans are extremely passive and diligent workers keeping their head down and blaming only themselves for their failure to “succeed.”
Carlin was a whistleblower and under appreciated in this capacity because he was a comedian and comedians are the only people like jesters in the medieval courts who are allowed to speak truth to power and are even celebrated for it. But in the end of the day they just help people to diffuse the anger, release pressure, and keep going, keep working.
Carlin did say this about the owners of America on the stage to a huge crowd — “It’s a big club and you ain't in it. Americans will remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day because the owners of this country know the truth it’s called the American dream — you have to be asleep to believe it.” And nothing changed. And this raping has only gotten more intense in the last twenty years.
To end on a positive note — I do believe there might be a way out of this misery but it requires a radical reimagining of what good life is. Maybe it doesn’t have to be about acquiring property as a way of having material assets that insure the safety of your family — maybe a good life can be about building a real community, treating friends like family, living in multigenerational households that make raising kids easier and a much happier experience. Maybe it is possible to get rid of such rigid demarcations of age groups and allow your aging parents to live and die at home — at your shared home — to let them play with your kids and tell them stories that create some sort of continuity and identity rooted in family history. Boomers, the current grandparents are themselves afflicted with the same malaise — yet they might be the last (and only) generation who had it all, who did live the American Dream and now want to die the American Death — atomized, surrounded by their peers in a medical facility. Maybe after they die off things will be different? Or maybe American society is so rigid and impossible to change that it’ll collapse like USSR — unable to reform itself without crumbling.
—Evgenia
a lot of "suburban castle" ideology complete with swing sets in the backyard and such is driven not by true fiefdom aspirations, but by the more mundane practical matter of needing to do the dishes and prep dinner while keeping the young kids occupied and within visibility. as for older kids, it is more about steering them away from populations deemed dangerous (whether this judgment is correct, racist, etc is another matter, and of course somewhat subjective).
new suburbs, specifically those constructed after 2014, shy away from the fiefdom design, and opt more for a community playground and small backyards. this is to foster a sense of community, and for the more economic reasons that people are increasingly too lazy to maintain their property and builders want to squeeze in as many houses as they can into a subdivision.
there is a book called _strong towns_ that i think you guys might like, if you are not familiar with. it talks about how suburbs have this "let's build the whole thing at once" design approach, which lends itself to awkward forms of isolation that cities do not have as well as very problematic design pattern in which the whole thing falls apart at once and then all the people with enough money move out, and those that can't stay, and then property values fall, tax receipts fall, etc. the authors argue this pattern will increasingly play out in the USA. the detroit model, as it is sometimes referred to.
I've been to a number of major cities in America the past decade or so. In Seattle I've seen lines of homeless people screaming - not just standing about - full-on screaming in front of Seattle's King County courthouse more than once. Go ahead and look at the street view of 3rd avenue on google maps - chances are you'll see a "clean" version but look at other snapshots from previous years and you'll see that line of people.
In Tucson I saw someone standing on a miserable traffic island in the middle of, like, 6 lanes of the speedway in ~30 degrees celsuis heat last spring somehow begging. There's no grass, hardly any vegetation, all concrete and strip malls. Dust.
Chicago in my limited experience wasn't nearly as terrible beyond the subway occasionally filled with people smoking weed or the beliigerent drunks, and neither was Boston, but both were absolutely teeming with cops to an almost comical degree.
There is a tendency to point to the British stereotype that English people love to be miserable, but I don't think people in the US are even aware they're swimming in misery, putting on a rictus smile throughout.