The New American Divide

When you hear or say the term "the American Dream" or "the American way of life" what is the first thing that you think of?  What do these terms or ideology mean to you?  Ask 100 Americans or even outsiders to the US and it's likely you'll get 100 varying answers.

With the rise of the Tea Party and  Occupy Wall Street they have brought the issue of equality or inequality depending upon what viewpoint you take to the forefront of discussion both politically, economically, and socially

No matter what position you may take I would conclude that most people not just Americans aspire to have a better life.  What that definition means as I pointed out above will vary greatly but in general in the US it has been to be "better off" than our parents or previous generation.  But is the possibility of a better life fading away?  Is the "American Dream" dying?

The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.

Via WSJ piece 

• When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.
• Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.