Saving the American Dream

by John K. Roth

The American Dream at its best is an ethical ideal and a moral compass. If respected and sustained, it can guide the United States through Trump 2.0. Anchored in the US Constitution, my new book, Saving the American Dream, features meditations for dark times. Meditations are intentional acts of focused attention. They seek insight—clear, accurate, and deep-down understanding—about critical issues of our time: What, for example, is good, right, and true, and what’s not? What is most important for the United States today, and what isn’t? Are we Americans doing the best we can? How may inquiry about the American Dream advance the reflection and action needed now to support and defend the Constitution of the United States?

Saving the American Dream is a journey that goes where such questions lead. Underscoring that no elections in American history are more important than those upcoming in 2026 and 2028, the book’s fundamental premise is that Americans moved to communal action by warned awareness and committed resistance are indispensable to meet challenges that grow by the day. Insights from American musicians and writers—philosophers, historians, novelists, poets, and essayists—map the way. Let’s see where some of them take us on July 3, 2026.

Locating the Dream

Two of the nation’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, died only hours apart on July 4, 1826. In The Great American Fourth of July Parade, Archibald MacLeish’s 1975 Bicentennial verse play for radio, the poet portrays them visiting—unrecognized—a contemporary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and Adams listen to the day’s Orator. They also exchange views with his audience. Observing that Americans find Jefferson’ s philosophy too optimistic, Adams nonetheless concludes with the final words he uttered on his deathbed a century and a half before: “Thomas Jefferson still lives.”[1]

Jefferson had died before Adams said those words on July 4, 1826, but they were figuratively true then and still are now. That fact, however, does not mean that Americans endorse the bombast of MacLeish’s Orator, which at one point becomes a hysterical yell: “THE U.S.A. IS NUMBER ONE!”[2] Suspicions are widespread that the American Dream’s expansive sense of possibility may have promised more than it ever could deliver.

Four years before MacLeish’s Fourth of July verse play, a countercultural writer named Hunter S. Thompson published a 1971 novel called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream. It details the surrealistic romp of a character named Dr. Duke and his attorney. Blasting through the desert in a huge Chevy convertible, they eventually find themselves somewhere on the northeast outskirts of Las Vegas. Now in a Cadillac styled the White Whale, “zooming along Paradise Road,” they stop at Terry’s Taco Stand, USA, to find their way. “Let me explain it to you,” Dr. Duke’s attorney tells the waitress. “We’re looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area. . . . We were sent out here from San Francisco to look for the American Dream, by a magazine, to cover it.”^[3]

The directions they get from the Taco Stand’s waitress and cook, whose name is Lou, are none too clear, but it seems that, in one of its manifestations, the American Dream may once have been a discotheque known as the Old Psychiatrist’ s Club. Following those leads, Dr. Duke and his attorney finally locate what’s left of the place: “A huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of tall weeds,” writes Thompson. “The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had ‘burned down about three years ago.’”

In “Better, Richer, Happier,” a New Yorker essay published a few days ago, Hua Hsu reflected on “the curious career of ‘the American Dream.’”[4] He did not mention Hunter Thompson, but Hsu did refer to the American historian James Trulow Adams. Forty years before Dr. Duke and his attorney discovered what was left of the American Dream—“cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot”—Adams had a different vision. In 1931, during the Great Depression, he published a widely read book called The Epic of America. It sold half a million copies and was translated into a dozen languages. Adams’s publisher nixed plans to call it The American Dream, but the book championed and popularized that concept.^[5]

The American Dream, said Adams, connotes “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every [person], with opportunity for each according to his [or her] ability or achievement. . . . It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a 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.”^[6] Adams believed that the Dream was “the greatest contribution” the United States had “as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world.”^[7]

As definitions of broad cultural concepts go, Adams’s understanding of the American Dream has much to commend it. He was on target when his understanding of the American Dream emphasized equality of opportunity, respect for others, decent living standards, and cohesive social values that transcend materialism and wealth. Thanks to him, the Dream keeps recurring in American culture. Advertising, books, music, and political rhetoric all show that the American Dream remains a vibrant concept.

As Hua Hsu points out, today one can visit the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, which opened in Washington, DC, in September 2025. It touts itself as “a beacon to the world to honor and preserve the ideal that everyone, everywhere, regardless of their age, race, gender, religion, or background, should have equal opportunity to pursue a life of meaning and fulfillment.”[8] Many Americans, however, don’t see that beacon. As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday tomorrow, less than half (46 percent) of the American people believe that everyone in the country has the opportunity to achieve the American Dream. Some Americans use dark words like scam, political propaganda, killed, dead to bury it. And yet the Dream persists and deserves to do so when it is at its best, when the Dream, as James Truslow Adams at his best saw, is primarily about democracy, liberty and justice for all, human rights, the rule of law, and a social order that is pluralistic and inclusive. That version of the American Dream is the one worth saving especially during the dark times of Trump 2.0.

Critical Issues

After Donald Trump was elected president for the second time, I had to do something to resist what I feared was coming. I decided to write the book called Saving the American Dream. It is dedicated to my granddaughter, Keeley Brooks, a recent Gen Z college graduate who grew up here in the Methow Valley. Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z mostly came of age during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump contagion. Those disruptions understandably discourage that group, which some call the “rejection generation,” because, as the journalist David Brooks says, “It’s just phenomenally hard to be young right now.”[9] Earlier generations have not had easy times, but for Gen Z, mainstays of the American Dream—home ownership, job security, work-hard-and-get-ahead, better life chances than previous generations had—cannot be taken for granted. More obvious instead are obstructions: the dysfunction of American politics, disruption caused by artificial intelligence (AI), lie-enabled corruption, resurgent cultural division and disrespect, environmental deterioration, and feeling priced out of the future.

Saving the American Dream confronts and resists those conditions. Governed by the Constitution, it has seven chapters, one for each of the Constitution’s seven articles. The book’s conclusion reflects the Constitution’s amendments. A preamble starts the inquiry.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

No American words are more beautiful, aspirational, and challenging. They imply that neither the Constitution nor the Dream is static. Both are and must be dynamic. The constant, core values—primary among them democracy, opportunity, liberty, equality, justice, and government loyal to the Constitution—must be interpreted, adapted, and amended to sustain their influence and impact amid changing times and fraught circumstances.

Saving the American Dream emphasizes American Dream priorities that are especially relevant for Gen Z and their children. Building homes is one of them. Home-owning should continue to be an American Dream aspiration for as many Americans as possible because home-owning creates stakeholding, which deepens commitment to our country. Homes cannot be owned, however, if an affordable supply of housing is lacking and good-paying jobs to make home-buying possible do not exist. No less important is awareness that, as the saying goes, a house is not necessarily a home. American Dream building in the mid-2020s and beyond requires due diligence about the conditions necessary for life-enriching homes. Those conditions include affordable childcare, food security for all Americans, a pollution-free environment, high-quality schools safe from gun violence, and a sane balance between work and leisure.

Securing and Sustaining Freedom

I have thought and taught about the American Dream for a long time. Often ambiguous and problematic but also principled and insistent, that concept riveted my attention in 1973, when a Fulbright fellowship took me to the University of Innsbruck, Austria. The Fulbright Program has long been the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the US government, but attacks against it by Trump 2.0 mindlessly jeopardize its future. Back in the day, my Fulbright responsibilities included teaching Austrian students about American philosophy, literature, and religion. The American Dream became the organizing theme for my lectures.

My Innsbruck office contained a large picture of Abraham Lincoln. It was strange to have that face looking at me amid baroque buildings and the Tyrolean Alps. But there it was as I did my preparation to teach Austrian students about the American Dream. Lincoln’s presence in my life—as a boy, I often visited the Indiana homestead where he came of age—still helps me to understand how central freedom is in the American Dream and the constitutional democracy it defends. So much depends on how we Americans understand freedom’s meanings, opportunities, limits, and responsibilities.

Securing freedom requires resisting autocracy, oligarchy, kleptocracy, corruption, incompetence, stupidity, and all the other vices that pervade “Trump world” darkness. Sustaining freedom entails seeking truth, respecting one another, honoring the differences between right and wrong, justice and injustice. Saving the American Dream is about all that challenging work. To get it done requires recognition we are more than the sum of our parts, that we must love this land of ours together, sometimes in spite of but always because of the Constitution we have ordained to “establish Justice . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Teaching about the American Dream in Austria led to a book called American Dreams. If Saving the American Dream is my Semiquincentennial or Sestercentennial book, American Dreams was a Bicentennial reflection. I dedicated it to a little girl named Sarah and Her Country on Their Birthday. Sarah, the mother of my granddaughter, and the United States share a Fourth of July birthday. For me, native son of one and father of the other, that coincidence remains especially important. It symbolizes the fact that the quality of my daughter’s life, her daughter’s life, and that of the United States are intertwined. In ways small and large, those relationships put responsibilities upon me. In becoming Sarah’s father in the early morning of July 4, I also became America’s more perceptive son, discovering in new ways, as I still do, that the country belongs to me and I to it.

Doing what’s needed to “establish Justice . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” is hard, never fully completed work. Sometimes American music helps me understand that. The cover of this month’s Atlantic magazine, for example, features Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War-time words for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”[10] They insist that “truth is marching on,” but it’s not likely to do so unless we are faithful to the Dream and its summation in the Pledge of Allegiance that affirms “liberty and justice for all.”

Doing the Best We Can

We Americans should still sing “America the Beautiful,” its words a poem that Katharine Lee Bates wrote in 1893 but first published to commemorate the Fourth of July in 1895. It rightly emphasizes the ongoing need to make “a thoroughfare for freedom,” to confirm our national soul in “self-control, our “liberty in law,” and, especially important, to mend our nation’s flaws. Thinking of that hymn today, I am also reminded of the North Carolina folk-rock Avett Brothers. I became aware of them only a few months ago when I heard their song called “We Americans.” Its lyrics also make a good Fourth of July reminder about saving the American Dream.

I grew up with reverence for the red white and blue

Spoke of God and liberty reciting the Pledge of allegiance . . .

But the story’s complicated and hard to read

Pages of the book obscured or torn out completely . . .

I am a son of Uncle Sam

And I struggle to understand

The good and evil

But I’m doing the best I can

If we do the best we can—that’s what it will take—it may be enough to save the American Dream and our country.

F. Scott Fitzgerald ended The Great Gatsby, his great 1925 novel, by evoking a haunting image and a melancholy mood. Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, contemplates Jay Gatsby’s unhappy attempt to fulfill his version of the American Dream. Gatsby, he thinks, must have felt his dream “so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” But as “the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night,” Carraway discerned that our aspirations, especially our best ones, elude fulfillment, no matter how hard we try or how fast we run to attain them.

“So we beat on,” The Great Gatsby concludes, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”[11] The American Dream can never be saved once and for all, let alone achieved fully. Beating on, the effort to save it will ceaselessly bear us back into the past without completion. Fitzgerald’s counsel, however, is not to give up in despair. Nothing worth doing—like saving the Dream, loving one’s country, or defending its Constitution—can be finished in a lifetime, at least not fully. But that fact makes it more important to do the best we can to form, as the Constitution says, “a more perfect Union.”

Better Than That?

Kay Ryan, a favorite contemporary American poet of mine, ends one of her poems by saying, “Things shouldn’t be so hard.”[12] She’s right. Saving the American Dream should not be as difficult and discouraging as it has become in the mid-2020s. Confronting that predicament, however, is where we Americans find ourselves. Decisions await. Despairing and giving up are not good options. They only ensure failure. A better way is making amends, trying for new beginnings, showing that we are “better than that.” What would it take for that to happen?

As it records a renewing relationship between a father and a son, Robert M. Pirsig’s widely read 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, provides a still timely response. Pirsig says his concern is less with “What’s new?” and more with “What’s best?” Traveling with spare parts and instruction books on motorcycle repair, he doesn’t want to get stranded or caught unprepared—if he can help it, which is not always possible. And yet, “it occurred to me,” Pirsig writes, “there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is either considered unimportant or taken for granted.”[13] Motorcycles are hardware: run by fuel, not by fidelity; sparked by plugs, not by perseverance. Aren’t attitudes toward them inconsequential? No fiction, of course, could be further from the truth, and that is Pirsig’s point. Turn the motorcycle into ourselves, our country, our world, and the lesson is made the more vital and the more difficult.

Toward the book’s end, Chris Pirsig asks his father if he can have his own motorcycle someday. Pirsig tells the boy he can, if he will take care of it. Chris’s questioning continues: What will I have to do? Will his father show him? Will those things be hard? Chris’s father replies: Of course, he will show and help his son. And what needs to be done won’t be so hard—at least, as Pirsig puts it, “not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard.”[14]

Cautious Hope

Another contemporary American poet, Maggie Smith, warns that “life is short,” and conservative estimates find that the world’s “at least half terrible.”[15] Those phrases come from her “Good Bones,” which turns a real estate idiom into moving poetry. Sometimes a place badly maintained, decrepit and dismal, still has good bones, a sound foundation and structural framework. It might be salvageable.

A cosmic realtor, Smith wants to sell us on the world, a place with abundant “good bones,” because “it could be beautiful, right?” What she says applies to the United States and the American Dream as well. Life is short. Our times and places are at least half terrible, but the United States has “good bones.” The American Dream at its best is proof of that. We can recover, reclaim, and rebuild. We can make our country and its Dream beautiful again.

The great nineteenth-century American poet, Emily Dickinson, lived a reclusive life in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is unlikely that she ever visited Long Island, where Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby, or saw Kay Ryan’s Niagara River. Nor did she have children to receive the “good bones” that Maggie Smith bequeathed to hers. But before Fitzgerald, Ryan, and Smith said so, Dickinson knew that living in America was hard. She saw that the world was at least half terrible. She fathomed that life’s current bears us back ceaselessly into the past and toward death. But also—like Fitzgerald, Ryan, and Smith—Dickinson knew that she could and must make beauty and thereby help to save the world and the good dreams it can inspire. Fitzgerald, Ryan, and Smith rightly echo Emily Dickinson. I will do what I can, Dickinson affirmed. “That I cannot,” she insisted, “must be unknown to possibility.”[16]

Informed by favorite American writers of mine and especially by the Constitution of the United States, Saving the American Dream tries to send out light and truth to guide and encourage all who seek “a more perfect Union.” The book ends with cautious hope. The hope should not be confused with optimism. It is closer to what the Black voice of W. E. B. Du Bois called “a hope not hopeless but unhopeful,” an outlook that says in spite of all the cruelty, corruption, and carnage of Trump 2.0, I will not give up on the Dream.[17]

American life has never fully been what it ought to be. It regularly falls far and horrifically short of that ideal. That fact, however, results in yearning for better times and better selves. Emily Dickinson called hope “the thingwith feathers” that perches deep down within us and never stops its singing.[18] Fragile and frustrated though hope may be, it persists and resists no matter what. My abiding conviction is that “We the People” will find our way to make the amendments we need to save the American Dream, our democracy, and our country.

1. Archibald MacLeish, The Great American Fourth of July Parade (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), 51.

2. MacLeish, The Great American Fourth of July Parade, 28.

3. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream (New York: Warner, 1982), 161, 164–65, 168.

4. Hua Hsu, “Better, Richer, Happier: The Curious Career of ‘the American Dream,’” New Yorker, June 29, 2026, 66–69. Accessible at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/07/battle-hymn-of-the-republic-julia-ward-howe/687318/.

5. See the biography by Allan Nevins, James Truslow Adams: Historian of the American Dream (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 58–72, 89–96.

6. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (1931; repr. Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), 415.

7. Adams, Epic of America, viii.

8. The Center’s website is accessible at: https://milkeninstitute.org/milken-center-advancing-american-dream-mcaad.

9. David Brooks, “‘We Are the Most Rejected Generation,’” New York Times, May 15, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/opinion/rejection-college-youth.html

10. See Jake Lundberg, “Never Call Retreat: How ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic Was Born—and Why It Endures as a Sacred National Song,” Atlantic, July 2026, 18–21. Accessible at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/07/battle-hymn-of-the-republic-julia-ward-howe/687318/.

11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; repr. Amazon Kindle, 2022), 110–11.

12. Kay Ryan, “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard,” in The Niagara River: Poems (New York: Grove, 2005), 41.

13. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974; repr., New York, Bantam, 1975), 27.

14. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 405.

15. Maggie Smith, “Good Bones,” in Waxwing Literary Journal 9 (Summer 2016). The full poem is accessible at: https://waxwingmag.org/items/Issue9/28_Smith-Good-Bones.php#top.

16. Emily Dickinson, “What I Can Do—I Will” (361), Hello Poetry. https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3964/what-i-can-do-i-will.

17.W. W. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr. New York: New American Library, 1969), 227–28.

18. Emily Dickinson, “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” (254), The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314..