We Can’t Save The American Dream By Pretending Everything Is Just Fine: Our country lives or dies based on how we address the very real problems that have put the American Dream far out of reach for most people

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We Can’t Save The American Dream By Pretending Everything Is Just Fine:

Our country lives or dies based on how we address the very real problems that have put the American Dream far out of reach for most people.

As the Democrat Party becomes increasingly controlled by self-admitted socialists, the right has mostly responded in one of two ways. The libertarian old guard has adopted the strategy of loudly and repeatedly pointing out the socialist left’s socialism, framing the issue as a 1980s-era battle between red commies and free markets. The populist new right, full of young voters suffering from the same economic hardships that disillusioned their leftist counterparts, believes you can’t beat the socialists until you start “making people’s lives better,” as Vice President J.D. Vance put it on Thursday.

“You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market,” Vance said on Fox News’ The Will Cain Show. “As much as I love the free market, you stop socialism by making people’s lives better.”

At odds with Vance are those like podcaster Ben Shapiro, who dismisses that approach as a “utopian scheme” propagated by “demoralization agents.” In response to the growing affordability crisis, Shapiro’s answer is to double down on “free markets” and to promise struggling young people that the American Dream is still plenty accessible as long as “you work hard.”

Shapiro’s ideology makes a lot more sense if you understand it as a ChatGPT-esque AI bot, but trained entirely on 2003-era GOP talking points and ignorant of everything that happened since. It all sounds nice, until you talk to anyone normal and see it’s completely divorced from actual reality.

The American Dream was a promise that if you worked hard, you could make it no matter the circumstances you were born into. But that promise has been inaccessible to tens of millions for decades, due in large part to policies Shapiro himself pushed. Take mass immigration, for example.

“I don’t give a good damn about the so-called ‘browning of America,’” he said in 2017, as the country was flooded with third-world H-1Bs and refugees from the Middle East wars he demanded. And before he comes in and says he was only talking about the need to care about ideology more than ethnicity, the third world only has one ideology: the ideology that elects people like Zohran Mamdani to loot people like me.

There are no Zohran Mamdanis without mass immigration. But the problem is even bigger than that.

White men in this country have been systematically locked out of the American Dream for decades. They fought its wars and forcibly bailed out its corrupt bankers, only to find themselves passed over for job after job because they didn’t pass corporate America’s diversity tests.

And the free market? A market that allows the mass importation of low-cost slave labor subsidized by its country of origin for the purpose of boxing out the men whose families built the nation and died for its freedom isn’t free in any meaningful sense.

Or let’s talk about housing. The American Dream was the idea that if you worked hard enough and saved, you could buy a house near your parents and grandparents. You could raise your kids and watch them ride their bikes down the street to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Your kids might even go to college one day.

After decades of artificially easy money, which simultaneously ballooned housing prices while making the dollars those men saved worth less and less, those homes are now beyond unaffordable. They’ll never be able to save the money necessary for the down payment, let alone afford the mortgage payment.

And forget about retirement. The manufacturing base that made careers at and pensions from one company is long gone, sold to China, which immediately stole all the IP and then started dumping the same products, but of much lower quality, back into the U.S. at below-market prices, once again subsidized by one of America’s foremost global enemies. At least Wall Street got rich off the offshoring of the American economy.

And college? You can again forget about that. Good luck affording $50,000/year, assuming your child even gets admitted ahead of a blue-haired they/them or an illegal immigrant somehow getting subsidized in-state tuition, all for the privilege of your child being taught he’s racist and evil because of the color of his skin. --->READ MORE HERE

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