How to Regenerate The American Dream

The Economist’s 2020 award for most-improved country went to Malawi, with New Zealand, Taiwan and Bolivia as runners-up. The United States of America, not surprisingly, didn’t rank — although the country was credited last year with developing a COVID vaccine in record time as well with voting out Donald Trump.

So can America become the world’s most-improved country in 2021? How might it reinvent itself to become this year’s Malawi?

Today, to launch my new Keen On Sunday panel show, I invited Kerri Arsenault, Carl Hoffman, Dale Maharidge and Tom Zoellner to discuss how to fix America. Each is the author of a critically acclaimed new book about contemporary America: Arsenault’s Mill Town, Hoffman’s Liar’s Circus, Maharidge’s Fucked At Birth, and Zoellner’s The National Road.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG8wJErHbh8&feature=youtu.be

The subtitle of Dale Maharidge’s Fucked At Birth is Recalibrating the American Dream. yes, we all know it’s broken now — but what, exactly, was the “American dream”?

(PHOTO FROM MILL TOWN)

It originally lay in the land. As Tom Zoellner argues in The National Road, America is “the first country to be based on an idea”. And that idea, he explains, was a shared geography (which, of course, never really existed):