I am 63 years old, born in 1945.  In my life, I have lived with two different American Dreams, and I am now seeing see a third emerge.  The change will carry with it very significant consequences.

My father’s father personifies the American Dream pre-WW II for me.  He was the first of his family to land at Ellis Island and then live in New York.  He worked to bring over a brother, and then together they brought over others until basically the whole family was living in New York.  Once here, they went into business.  Legend has it that my grandfather operated a street cart selling hot potatoes, and that the enterprise lasted maybe as much as a full day.  He tried a few things apparently until he and his brothers started a woman’s coat business that did okay in good years and was able to hang in there in bad years – I never really knew what caused a year to be good or bad.

My grandfather personifies the American Dream of his generation for me because he and I actually discussed it.  About a week before he died, my parents sent me to live with him and my grandmother for a week or so in a summer cottage they rented near West Point, NY.  There was not much for a 12-year old boy to do there so I spent time talking with my grandfather, basically asking him questions and letting him have all the time he wanted (and took) to answer them.  To him, life was about perseverance.  Through good times and bad times, enjoy your victories, cope with your challenges and keep going.  Basic to that philosophy was the premise that in the United States instead of running away from constant difficulties of all sorts, you could keep going in the direction of opportunities.  The opportunity to be your own boss, make some money and improve your life.  The opportunity to send your kids to college and see them live an even better life.  You could pick the opportunities of your choice, even if it was simply to have a decent paying steady job, and know that if you persevered you could realize your dream.  American was the Land of Opportunity and the American Dream was synonymous with that.

After WW II, the nation began a long period of expansion.  People began to move to the suburbs; they bought cars; they bought second cars, TVs, and bigger houses; they went on vacations every year, and otherwise possessed things and did things that were major advancements over my grandfather’s quality of life.

Certainly many factors drove our culture and shaped the world view of the U.S. citizen, but something that I think is dismissed way too often is the rise of the efficiency and effectiveness in getting messages to people.  Specifically, since WW II, Americans have been increasingly inundated with messages based on one primary call to action: buy.  Buy bigger, newer, glitzier, more tech, more expensive, more whatever, but buy – even if you don’t have the money to afford it now, borrow the money and buy it now.

A few months ago there was a news item about a survey that proved that teenagers who are regularly exposed to sexual messages via TV and music and movies, etc., have more sex than those who aren’t.  Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?

Here is something else that makes just as much sense.  For sixty years – that is, for basically the entire conscious life of the people who comprise the U.S. economy – the people of the U.S. have been told that being a consumer was what life was all about.  Is it any surprise that some 70 percent of the nation’s economy was built on the consumer?  The American Dream of perseverance in the pursuit of opportunities gradually was replaced with the pursuit of possessions, with the sooner the gratification the better.  That American Dream has crashed.

And now, the American Dream must be replaced with something that will shape our national culture the way perseverance drove my grandfather’s generation and consumerism drove it since WW II.  That Dream will influence policies both formal and informal.  Because we live in a global economy, because people throughout the world can access information and communicate through the Internet, and because the U.S. still largely sets global standards and values, the new American Dream will become the global dream.  The economic consequences are enormous.

The new American Dream is being defined largely by Barack Obama as, each day, he has visibility in front of the people of the U.S. and the world.  More importantly, he is leading a revolution in our nation’s political philosophy that is well underway, even if it does not yet have a name.

It will be some time until the new American Dream is fully defined.  After all, there’s still the issue of the structure of our health care system, the resolution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prospect of terrorism, the availability of energy resources now and in the future, and several other major issues that will define what we are about as a nation.  Furthermore, there will be subtleties and a great deal of grays along with the blacks and whites.  Nevertheless, I think something like the American Dream is basically a simple thought, and here is the core premise that I think is emerging as the new American Dream:

Obtaining stability and minimizing downside risk will become higher priorities than encountering volatility and maximizing opportunity.

We are already hearing that basic premise in the pronouncements about the president’s economic stimulus and banking stabilization policies.  We’re seeing a similar tone in Obama’s foreign policy as evidenced most recently by his statements at the G20 Summit.  “We exercise our leadership best when we are listening … when we show humility,” he said.

Whether this approach is great or evil will be determined in the future.  But, at its core, this is an approach that arises from the belief that it is better to attend to people in need versus encourage the pursuit of greed.  If I were sitting in Thelma Z. Lavine’s social philosophy class at George Washington University today (as I did in 1967), she’d ask:  Does this philosophy’s viability rely on the actual nature of the human or does it require a change in the nature of human?   And, then, the question would be:  What other political philosophies were based on a change in the nature of the human and how did they suceed?