"How Bad Does It Have to Get?" How the Ideology of the American Dream Persists in an Era of Economic Insecurity.

Academics, policymakers, and the media are engaged in a widespread public conversation on the economic decline of the American working and middle classes. However, we lack an understanding of how Americans make sense of these changes in the context of their own lives, and whether these shifts lead them to question the fairness of the economic system. My dissertation draws upon interviews with 56 white working and middle-class parents in a Rust Belt state to show how individuals largely consent to an economic system that disadvantages them, even as most felt insecure about their financial circumstances. Instead of questioning the fairness of the economic system in light of their struggles, they articulated a modern version of the dominant stratification ideology in America, often called the American Dream, that argues mobility systems and processes generally are fair, and socioeconomic mobility is attainable. I identify three factors that play a key role in my participants’ widespread belief that the economic system rewards individual effort: family capital, localized blame, and mobility optimism. First, the majority of families in my sample had access to family capital, or financial transfers or logistical help with childrearing from their parents or in-laws. These transfers insulated them from the “true nature” of the economic system, and meant many participants were able to both live a lifestyle that would not have been possible based on their income alone and avoid falling into deeper economic hardship. Yet, most recipients did not acknowledge the role that such transfers play in people’s ability to live a middle class lifestyle, or that such help may not be available to all. This made it relatively easy to maintain a belief that hard work and effort are enough to get by, and ignore the structural inequalities in the system. While family capital buffered my participants from the “true nature” of the economic system, local blame and mobility optimism allowed individuals who believed they were struggling economically to make sense of their circumstances using the ideology of the American Dream. Local blame is when participants explained their economic hardships by focusing on their own choices or actions: they saw their lives as embodying the ideology of the American Dream because they believed their own choices made it more difficult for them to get ahead economically. Participants were especially critical of their perceived overconsumption, and many compared their spending habits unfavorably to those of their parents, who they believed were economically secure because they “lived within their means.” The second way in which the majority of participants who reproduced the dominant ideology believed their lives were embodied by the American Dream is mobility optimism. Mobility optimism includes “mobility projects,” such as increasing one partner’s human capital, and “mobility expectations,” such as a pay increase. Individuals with mobility optimism believed their hard work would be rewarded, and viewed their hardships as temporary. Together, family capital, local blame, and mobility optimism seemed to play a key role in how the majority of my participants maintained a belief that economic opportunity is plentiful. My research indicates that we cannot assume people will connect the larger economic changes of the past few decades to their lives, even in the face of a growing public conversation about the economic decline of the middle and working classes. PHDSocial Work & SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140842/1/jwieds_1.pd