The Vices of Our Virtues: Tocqueville and the Constitution of the American Dream

Abstract

The American Dream does not amount, as is often alleged, to the empty promise of a naive exceptionalism. Nor does it reduce to the self-indulgent expectation of instant gratification. Rather, the rhetoric of the Dream is most often employed precisely to critique these one-dimensional distortions, to admonish that the nation’s aspirational identity is in crisis and on the verge of decline into daydream, pipe dream, or nightmare. Drawing on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, I argue that the Dream is a resonant but precarious synthesis of the values of individual freedom, material progress, and moral community. These dimensions stand in tension with one another and are moreover prone to their respective excesses of individualism, materialism, and moralism. Within the dynamic of this complex constitution, the Dream sanctions its own critique; we reaffirm our promise by denouncing our prodigality. As such, the Dream serves as the jeremiad of the American civil religion.