“The American Dream” as a phrase connotes that there is something exceptional and particular to the United States. It's something other countries don't have, at least in the way we have it. The American Dream involves a story that we tell about ourselves, and that we believe makes us special.
One special story we tell, particularly regarding our immigrants, is the story of social mobility. In school, we read our Jane Austen and George Eliot and roll our eyes at how stultified and regimented is the empire from which we broke. In America, more than anywhere else, you can become what you want to become regardless of where you started out.
It's easy to fall into materialistic thinking here, and to view this mobility as a purely economic phenomenon. That would be a mistake. You cannot understand the American Dream and American economic mobility if you look at them as matters of dollars and cents. There's another American peculiarity behind them, and Alexis de Tocqueville noted it a few hundred years ago.
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” the Frenchman wrote in Democracy in America. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small . . . . There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America.”
These two defining characteristics of America—our “associations” and our economic and social mobility—are married.
Economist Raj Chetty found that the places with high upward mobility tended to have high social capital, even when you control for other factors. That is, if you measure the number of community institutions, churches, and bowling leagues, along with the amount of volunteering, the political involvement, and the amount of charitable giving, you can predict the type of place where a child born in poverty could rise up the ranks.
America is the land of opportunity because America is the land of civil society. The American Dream of mobility is alive to the extent that the American Dream of robust local community is alive. For nearly two generations, this Dream has been fading.
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