The American Dream: Is There a Belgian Dream? Do the Chinese Have a Chinese Dream? What Is It About That Catchphrase?

As America struggles to find its economic footing, questions are raised about whether 'average' Middle-Class citizens can afford home ownership, a new car every two years, a couple weeks vacation, college education and a host of other attributes that constitute what used to be called the American Dream.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked in 1941 about the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. To much of the world that still sounds pretty good. To Americans, those are rights which are now taken for granted. It is the material attainments that symbolize those freedoms that many now fear are disappearing.

So how come Americans have a national dream and no one else does? Well, of course, almost everyone has dreams of a better life, but as a nation of immigrants - truer now than many Americans would like - dreams of a brighter future impelled ancestors and even some of today's citizens to leave the familiar behind and start over in a new world. Many citizens in other countries kind of like the familiar. That is why they stay. Some, as in China, may move around within their country, but many do not. This does not imply, for most people in the world, some sort of judgment on the value of other types of citizenship, though again, there are advocates of 'American Exceptionalism' who do seem to feel it necessary to make exactly that statement. So for them, the disappearance of The Dream is a mortal wound.

For many others, the cultural and historical legacies and traditions into which they were born are Dream equivalents: living up to the cultural, economic, political and military achievements of yesteryear are in themselves, worthy challenges and goals.

Whether the American Dream is threatened - and why - remains a source of acrimonious debate. But whether it is tied too closely to material wealth and not enough to values rather than value is a question worth asking. JL

Julia Felsenthal reports in Slate:

"Several recent news articles on the sluggish economy have noted that a central tenet of the "American Dream," home ownership, may no longer be within reach. Some columnists, meanwhile, are taking the opportunity to argue that we shouldn't associate the "American Dream" so strongly with buying a house or a condo. Do other countries have an equivalent of the American dream?

Not exactly. America seems to be unique in having an internationally recognizable catchphrase that sums up its national ethos—the French don't have a "rêve Français" and the Spanish don't have a "sueño español."
The Explainer did come across some attempts to create taglines. U.K. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband coined the phrase "the British Promise", meaning that each generation can and will do better than the last, but it hasn't caught on. After the fall of the Soviet Union, both Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, and Vladimir Putin, in 1999, asked advisers to think up a "national idea" or a "Russian idea" to replace the outdated Soviet/Communist ideologies. But the search eventually turned into a bit of a joke, and the phrase never came to embody one particular notion. As discourse about China's middle class grows, the term "Chinese Dream" has been bandied about by newspaper journalists and authors—but, again, the phrase isn't anywhere near as pervasive or resonant as the American dream.

That said, the generic principle of the American dream—an identifiable vision of what it means to be middle class, and a path to achieving that—exists in some way in lots of different places. For example, in a book that plays off the American dream idea, called The European Dream, the author voices some sense of a European equivalent. In the European Dream, community relationships are more important than individual autonomy, quality of life is more important than wealth accumulation, and the prevailing attitude is "work to live" not "live to work."

In Russia today, a sign that a person has arrived in the middle class is not home ownership (Russians actually have a rather complicated relationship with housing and mortgages) but the ability to travel abroad—a relic of all the years when Russia was a closed country. A 2009 novel about the corrupt world of Russian politics (supposedly written under a pen name by one of Putin's aides) describes Moscow cocktail parties in which the first question people ask each other upon greeting is "So where have you traveled recently?"

In China, as in the United States, urban middle class-ness entails owning a home and a car, as well as having access to education and travel. When talking about home ownership, the Chinese sometimes refer to wanting an urban "oasis," a term that connotes an apartment of one's own decoration and appointed in a modern way. Such aspirations a step away from the more traditional Chinese national idea of a society in which everyone is comfortable but nobody is rich.