American Dream vs. American Delusion

New York Times image. The American Dream.

I can't say that I get much out of reading Richard Cohen's columns in the Washington Post, but he has that line in the latest piece, "History Roars Back." From the article:

The rage that is coming will change the politics of our time. Barack Obama will either figure out how to channel it, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did, or he will be flattened by it, as Lyndon Johnson was. Obama's challenge might even be greater than FDR's. The people of the 1920s and '30s were tough, hard. They did not expect all that much from life, and they had learned to expect next to nothing from government.

In contrast, we are soft, coddled. We actually thought that we could have a house we could not afford and a mortgage that we could not pay and that it would all somehow work out. This keeps being called the American dream. It was actually the American delusion.

The delusion is that gas would be cheap forever, and that we could spend all our money, that housing prices would rise forever, and that we could have a thriving economy even though it is now focused on consumption--at the Main Street conference, a presentation by people from Economic Research Associates stated that until the downturn, 67% of the U.S. economy was based on consumer spending (we aren't producing goods, we're buying goods), and that spending was driven by tapping home equity.

This for me is the American nightmare, or the American Delusion. I-495 at US 29, Virginia. Washington Post photo.