The State of the American Dream

Today in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan reflects on what's happened to the American Dream and offers opinion on what should be done in Arizona:

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They'll be richer or more educated, they'll have a better job or a better house, they'll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. "The richest family in town," they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It's all about trying to rise.