Opinion | The American dream, what dream exactly
By Tom Fowdy
Recently I made the decision to visit the United States for the first time in seventeen years. Having devoted most of my adulthood travel to the Asia-Pacific, with an added portion of Europe owing to the position of my own country, the desire to see America again ultimately shone through me and I successfully obtained a tourist visa to the country after having been disqualified from the US visa waiver program having previously visited North Korea. Ultimately, even amidst my years-long criticism and scathing disapproval of the Washington D.C. bubble and belligerent US foreign policy, the soft power of this country still got me, for even I, despite my sheer disdain of America's politicians, cannot deny its fundamental appeal.
But does this appeal, or how we imagine America, actually exist in reality? My experience in the country makes me question that all the time, which the complicated answer can best be summarised in a microcosm through the city of Los Angeles. The area we know as LA is on paper and in idealisation, one of the most culturally influential cities in the world. As the centerpiece and heart of America's film industry, Los Angeles captures the hearts and minds of people all around the planet and projects the very imagery that makes America so "popular." Districts such as the Hollywood Walk of Theme contain the embedded names of thousands of individuals who have sustained global acclaim, representing success, fame, and fortune and amidst it the iconography of "The American Dream."
And sure enough, there are many people living in Los Angeles who have bought into such a dream, not through simply watching films, but through the wider entrenched discourse that America represents a land of plentiful and abundance, a path to fortune, prosperity, and a successful life. That sentiment is embodied by the city's enormous Hispanic population who have become its largest ethnic group, but also the vast numbers of Koreans who migrated here in the generations before their country also became prosperous, nonetheless reminding us that Koreans for some odd reason continue to be in awe of the United States and its culture. Even for ourselves, the British, who owing to America's brazen problems do not view the country as a prospective place to migrate (They prefer Australia and Canada), the viral way America's idealisms capture our imagination remains.
Yet on the ground, the realities of Los Angeles and many places like it call into question the reality of the "American dream" and the gap between fantasy and reality. The shining light of stardom and movies paint over a city that faces a tremendous number of struggles, including poverty, homelessness, crime, eyewatering costs of living, poor public transport infrastructure, litter, graffiti and urban decay. I have to be completely honest to my experience that while some of these things have been this way for a long time, Los Angeles comes across to me as a city in decline, and unless you are super rich and can afford the reclusively of Beverley Hills luxury, it is in practice a largely undesirable place to live in overall. The cultural icon that the world knows this city as tells us nothing about when it comes to facts.
I subsequently realized on seeing this that when American politicians are talking about a booming economy and record job numbers, or even pointing fingers at China's economic situation, they are in effect telling lies. The constant euphoria of a booming stock market that always goes up and a constantly strong US dollar, mean nothing on the ground. Are we going to pretend Americans have never had it better? I beg to differ. While the elusive rhetoric of "the American dream" has always painted over a Grand Canyon-sized gulf between the rich and the poor, this problem has undoubtedly only gotten worse in recent years, and seemingly, the country is not in fact working for the majority. This is why, even beyond the Democratic heartlands of metropolitan Los Angeles, the rise of the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement and Donald Trump's politics has been so effective.
This is not because their grievances are necessarily correct, but because America's socio-economic order does not deliver how it was once perceived to. For some, there is a sense of being squeezed and left behind, and to have blamed China for this unfavorable state of affairs has on a domestic level been a cynical political ploy that confronts the current US is ultimately the making of its elite and its politicians. Yet we, and even myself, still stand hypnotized by the magnetism of what it supposedly represents. Soft power is the ability to sway international affairs by the power of your appeal, the attractiveness of your ideas and iconography. It is why South Korea and Japan love America despite being far better societies to live in, it is why America is loved but China is hated, despite the terrible things the US has done around the world, and it is why its opportunistic and insufferable political class is repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt again and again. Yet the America that exists in our mind, in our hopes, dreams and fantasies masks a country that is increasingly a shadow of its former self. I do not write this to put down my whole experience, especially in a country that is nonetheless so vast, but if you see Los Angeles as an icon of everything the US depicts itself as you might find yourself underwhelmed.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
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