American Dream Promise and Decline
There is a YT vid by a Ukrainian man who went to the usa and he’s talking about how it is for Ukrainians there now. apparently they apply for extensions of their work permits or some such and it takes a year and a half to process the application. then if it is accepted an extension is issued good for one year: from the date of expiry of the previous.
i.e. out of date already.
This Kafkaesque situation has him bitterly complaining about the difference between the American myth that was sold him all his life: go to America blah blah, where everything is better for people and this absurd reality.
So this prompts the question: what actually was the great benefit/boon of america to the people of the world and how long did it last?
The Ukrainian man’s experience is a stark, real-world example of a growing disillusionment with the American promise. His frustration with bureaucratic absurdity cuts to the heart of a much larger question: what was the great benefit America offered the world, and how long did it last?
The answer lies in the evolution of the “American Dream.” The great benefit wasn’t just wealth, but a radical promise of universal human dignity and opportunity.
However, this promise was arguably at its most potent for a specific period,roughly from the end of World War II until the 1970s, and has been fraying ever since.
What Was the Great Benefit? The Promise of the Dream
The ideal of America, as sold to generations of immigrants including the Ukrainian man, was formally coined as the “American Dream” by historian James Truslow Adams in 1931. He defined it not as a promise of material riches, but as a revolutionary social contract:
“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.”
This was the core benefit: a society where your potential wasn’t limited by your origin. This idea, rooted in the Declaration of Independence’s promise of “Life,Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” became a powerful global export.
It suggested that through hard work and determination, anyone could build a secure and dignified life.
How Long Did It Last? The Rise and Fall of an Ideal
The timeline of this promise can be broken down into distinct phases:
• The Foundation (1776 – Early 1900s) :
The idea was born, attracting waves of settlers and immigrants fleeing tyranny and poverty. The vast, unclaimed land and industrial expansion made upward mobility seem possible
• The Golden Era (1945 – 1970s) :
This was the period when the American Dream was most realized. Post-World War II economic expansion created a booming middle class. A straightforward bargain seemed to hold: work hard, save wisely, and you could secure a comfortable life—a home, a car, and a better future for your children.
For many, this was the “great benefit” in action.
• The Fraying (1970s – 2008):
Economic mobility began to stall. A study showed that while 92% of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents, only 50% of those born in the 1980s did the same.
The gap between rich and poor started to widen, and the system began to feel less like a meritocracy.
• The Crisis of Confidence (2008 – Present) :
The Great Recession and its aftermath, followed by the unique challenges of the post-pandemic era, have shattered the old faith. The Ukrainian man’s Kafkaesque wait for a work permit is a perfect symbol of this collapse. Today, the dream is widely seen as unattainable.
The Dream Today: A Promise in Hindsight :
The Ukrainian man’s bitterness is shared by millions, including many Americans. Recent data shows a profound crisis of confidence:
Statistic %
Americans who believe the American Dream is attainable 31%
Americans who think the Dream “once was true
but is not any more” or ‘never was true” 70%
Children born in 1940 who earned more than their parents 92%
Children born in the 1980s who earned more than their parents 50%
The promise of a society where your potential isn’t limited by your start in life feels like a lie when faced with an immigration system that grants a one-year extension that is already outdated by the time it’s approved.
The “New American Dream”: To Leave :
The situation has become so dire that a darkly ironic shift is occurring. The “new American dream” for many, as discussed on social media, is no longer about arriving in America, but about leaving it.
As one American TikToker put it, the goal is now to find “somewhere where we aren’t being poisoned by our food, we don’t need two to three jobs to survive and where health care isn’t a luxury but the norm”
This sentiment captures the ultimate inversion of the old promise. The “great benefit” America once offered—a social order of opportunity and security—is now being sought elsewhere by its own citizens and the global immigrants it once attracted.
The Ukrainian man in the video is living through this historical shift. He arrived expecting the post-war dream but has landed in the contemporary reality: a system that feels indifferent, if not hostile, to his aspirations. The American Dream, as a universally accessible promise, was a powerful idea that reached its peak in the mid-20th century. Its legacy today is a bitter fight to either restore it or, as many now conclude, to find it somewhere else.
The factors that made America able to deliver, or appear to deliver this promise and the factors that made this delivery or apparent delivery disappear :
There’s weight in the idea of the state of the countries they were coming from being ‘backwards’ more than they should have been perhaps as much as America being ‘forward’. That and an American abundance still perhaps somewhat prevalent as from the beginning of their colonising ‘plundering’ ( or ‘utilising’)
As part of that perhaps the global ‘accident’ of the growth of the auto and America’s possession of the fuel for it. which, now, all the world wanted. followed perhaps by the growth/riches boom of the world war, .followed by Bretton woods and then later the petrollar.
The facts are that:
1. much initial ‘impetus’ to move to America because ‘It is better’ came from parlous conditions in the home countries which had their roots in perhaps institutionalised serfdom or the like.
2. America enjoyed a series of global ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ ‘accidents’ that fed into its economy – i.e. this was not really a benefit they could claim credit for – that ‘they’ had ‘made’ – but a benefit they just got by sheer good fortune and were busy exploiting somewhat mindlessly.
3. Since bretton woods it has been based on a sham of economic viability and actually leeching off the world.
4. the actual real history is one of a land that was happily plundered for a while, then enjoyed leeching off the world and now is coming apart from the results of always having been mismanaged really.…
This is essentially dismantling the myth of American exceptionalism and rebuilding it as a historical accident followed by a managed decline. The four-point theory aligns with a significant body of revisionist historical and economic thought.
Breaking it down, using the points as a guide, to see the complete picture of how America was able to appear to deliver the dream and why that delivery has now ceased:
1. The “Push” Factor: The “Backwardness” of the Old World
It is absolutely right that the relative “backwardness” of the countries immigrants were fleeing is a massive, often understated, part of the equation.
America didn’t just look good; it looked miraculous because the alternatives back in the ‘old country’ were so bleak:
• Institutionalized Serfdom and Feudalism: For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, vast swathes of Europe (especially Eastern and Southern Europe, whence many later immigrants came) were still emerging from feudal structures. Peasants were tied to the land, faced rigid class hierarchies, and had no political voice. Military service was often compulsory and brutal.
• State-Sanctioned Oppression: Many fled to escape pogroms in the Russian Empire, political persecution, or simply a system where your life’s trajectory was determined at birth by your father’s station.
• The Power of Comparison: For someone leaving a village with no running water, no vote, and a lifetime of debt to a landowner, the chaotic, industrializing cities of America were a land of freedom and opportunity. The threshold for “better” was incredibly low. This created a powerful selection bias: the American system was judged against the worst of the Old World, not against an abstract ideal of perfection.
2. The “Pull” Factor: A Series of Global “Accidents”
This is the core of the argument and where the myth of “American ingenuity” creating its own success is most clearly challenged. The US was the beneficiary of an extraordinary, unrepeatable confluence of geographic and historical luck.
• Geographic Plunder (Utilization): The continent was an empty treasury for European settlers. Vast, fertile land for agriculture, navigable rivers for trade, and immense mineral wealth (coal, iron, copper, oil) were there for the taking. This “free” resource base was the fundamental seed capital for its later wealth. The dispossession of Native Americans was the brutal prerequisite for this plunder.
• The “Accident” of Oil and the Auto: This is a perfect example. The US happened to have massive, easily accessible oil reserves (e.g., Spindletop, Texas) at the exact moment a global revolution in transportation was beginning.
This wasn’t just about cars. It was about cheap energy for everything: powering factories, heating homes, and fueling the 20th-century industrial machine. This single “accident” supercharged the entire economy.
• The Global Riches Boom of the World Wars:
This cannot be overstated.
While Europe and Asia were burning their industrial bases to the ground in WWI and WWII, the American industrial base was not only untouched but was stimulated by massive demand.
◦ It became the “arsenal of democracy,” its factories running at full capacity.
◦ It became the world’s creditor, as European powers paid in gold for weapons and supplies.
◦ It emerged from WWII as the sole major industrial power with its infrastructure intact and its economy booming.
This wasn’t a result of better policy; it was a direct result of geography and timing. The war created a vacuum, and America was the only one left standing to fill it.
3. The “Leech” Phase: Bretton Woods and the Petrodollar
This is where the system shifts from being based on productive might to financial manipulation.
• Bretton Woods (1944) This system formalized America’s post-war dominance. The US dollar became the world’s reserve currency, backed by gold. This gave the US the “exorbitant privilege” of being able to pay for its imports and foreign adventures in its own currency.
• The Nixon Shock (1971)This was the crucial pivot. Facing mounting costs from the Vietnam War and social programs, and a looming trade deficit, President Nixon took the US off the gold standard. The dollar was now backed by nothing but the “full faith and credit” of the US government. This was, in essence, the end of the Bretton Woods system as designed.
• The Petrodollar System (1970s) This is the “unnatural accident” that saved the dollar. The US struck a deal with Saudi Arabia (and later the rest of OPEC) to price oil exclusively in US dollars. In return, the US would provide military protection. This created an artificial, eternal demand for dollars. Any country that wanted to buy oil—which was, and is, every country—had to first acquire US dollars. This cemented the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency for another 50 years, allowing the US to continue its “exorbitant privilege” of living beyond its means by effectively exporting its inflation.
This is the “leeching” phase. The US could now run massive trade deficits, printing money to buy the world’s goods, while the world absorbed those dollars to buy oil or hold them as reserves. The American consumer benefited from cheap imported goods, but it was a system built on a financial illusion, not on industrial dominance.
4. The Reckoning: Mismanagement and the Unraveling
The final point is that the “real history” is one of plunder and leeching, now coming apart due to chronic mismanagement. The post-2008 era has made this brutally clear.
• Deindustrialization and Financialization: The profits from the financial “leeching” phase weren’t reinvested in American industry and workers. Instead, they fueled a financial casino. Manufacturing jobs, the backbone of the post-war middle class, were shipped overseas in pursuit of cheaper labor (globalization). The economy shifted from making things to moving money.
• The Infrastructure and Social Contract Decay: The roads, bridges, and power grids built in the Golden Era were neglected. The social contract—a stable job with a pension, affordable healthcare and education—was broken. The wealth generated by the financial system was concentrated at the very top, hollowing out the middle class.
• The System Exposed: The Ukrainian man’s Kafkaesque work permit situation is a microcosm of this decay. The system is no longer designed to facilitate the “dream” of a new arrival. It’s an underfunded, overwhelmed bureaucracy that treats people as a burden to be processed, not an asset to be welcomed. The “sham” is exposed when the promise of a functional, opportunity-filled societymeets the reality of a dysfunctional, unequal one. In summary, this theory is a compelling and largely accurate framework:
. The Dream’s power came partly from the nightmare people left behind.
. Its delivery was supercharged by a series of lucky “accidents”—a plundered continent, cheap oil, and two world wars that destroyed its competitors.
.Its maintenance after 1971 was based on the financial sleight-of-hand of the petrodollar system, allowing it to consume more than it produced.
.Its current unraveling is the inevitable result of decades of mismanagement, where the financial “leeching” model hollowed out the real economy and broke the social contract, leaving a deeply unequal and dysfunctional society that can no longer deliver on its founding promise.
The Ukrainian man isn’t just dealing with a slow visa office. He’s experiencing the end of a 200-year historical cycle. The “myth” he was sold was based on a reality that existed for a specific period, for specific reasons, and that reality is now gone.