The Myth of Opportunity Has Broken America

When President Donald Trump delivered his second inaugural address on Monday, January 20, he preserved a tradition of national mythmaking that has only served Americans poorly. Beyond the expected theatrics, Trump declared the U.S. to be “history’s greatest civilization,” despite its fixture as the most unequal nation with the lowest life expectancy, even just among Western democracies of today. And, despite his record-thin margin of victory in November’s election, the President claimed that “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

What’s actually noteworthy about this moment, however, is that there is a rare current of agreement among Americans today. The consensus comes in the form of a deep pessimism about our most cherished national story. One recent poll of American voters conducted by WSJ/ NORC found that only 36% still believe in an American Dream broadly defined by the idea that hard work begets success and upward mobility. This finding represents a big tumble downward from 2012 when, even in the shadow of the Great Recession that cleaned millions of families out, 52% of Americans still held fast to the story of the dream. 

The far-reaching senses of despair and disenchantment in the U.S. aren’t solely the results of bad trade deals or corporate concentration or the American retreat from social and civic engagement. They can’t be described strictly through the failure of the government to protect citizens and consumers from the exploding cost of necessities like housing, healthcare, education, and childcare. The national gloom stems from something deeper, specifically the torment of a supposedly cohering national story about opportunity that is encoded in culture, policy, and civic life.

Read More: Why a ‘Third Life’ Is the Answer to America’s Loneliness Epidemic

Historically, to be American (for some at least) meant the chance to live free of the titles, class static, and feudal baggage of the Old World. Even before the term was coined, an American Dream of being socially mobile by means of hard work dusted industriousness with a special merit-driven magic that has seduced and frustrated millions. From the Pilgrims and founding fathers through the frontier and all the way to today’s hustle culture, gig economy, and ragged-by-design safety net, the essential American folk tale has plaited hard work with destiny, self-reliance with self-actualization, and success with moral worth. 

The trouble with that story is that it makes struggle feel shameful. Take the nation’s kludgy public assistance programs, which are purposefully gummed up with red tape. A 2020 audit by the Government Accountability Office, for example, found that roughly 8,000 Americans file for bankruptcy and another ten thousand people die every year while waiting for a disability benefit decision (or an appeal) to be decided by the Social Security Administration. “The administrative burdens themselves are, in some sense, a deliberate test of deservingness,” Dr. Heather Hahn, an associate vice president at the nonpartisan think tank Urban Institute, explained of America’s social insurance programs. “It’s this assumption that only someone truly, desperately needy, who really has no other options, is going to put up with all that is required. That adds to this deservingness.”

Meanwhile, in public retellings, the Americans who don’t make ends meet while providing care work for loved ones or battling at terrible jobs are just people without sufficient ambition. “I don’t think hard-working Americans should be paying for all the social services for people who could make a broader contribution and instead are couch potatoes,” former Florida representative Matt Gaetz once argued in 2023 while lobbying against anti-poverty programs. 

Similarly, an individual drowning in student debt is never someone who took out loans to go to nursing school or dropped out of an engineering program to care for a sick parent. It’s always some loafer or wastrel who, in the words of Senator Ted Cruz, “studied queer pet literature” or a “slacker barista who wasted seven years in college” and can’t “get off the bong for a minute.” On the other hand, those who make it are upheld as virtuous and enlightened. Calling up the 2016 electoral map, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued that, “All that red in the middle, where Trump won, what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” 

While the narrative around opportunity has largely remained fixed, the American experience has degraded from one of bootstrapping to one of white-knuckling. Over the past 45 years, the U.S. economy has doubled in size and American workers have grown 81% more productive while their wages have only grown 29%, according to the Economic Policy Institute . (Workers of color and workers without college degrees have seen their real wages decline.) Today, medical debt is the biggest cause of bankruptcy in America and baby formula is one of the most shoplifted items. According to a Brookings Institution study, 44 % of Americans work jobs that qualify as low-wage. 

“I did everything I was supposed to do,” Nakitta Long, a single mother of two with a Master’s degree in North Carolina, told me about the impossibility of finding a job that might sustain her family. “Why is this not simple?”

These are some of the mad-making, faith-shredding headwinds that made arguments about preserving democracy fall flat for people already failed by a democracy where hard work doesn’t pay off. 

They are the same winds that have rustled President-elect Donald Trump back into power. And we’re learning again, from Capitol rotunda to the displaced communities of Southern California, winds can very easily carry fires.

Adapted excerpt from 99% PERSPIRATION by Adam Chandler. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Adam Chandler.