WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Flyover Features: Is the American Dream Really Dead?

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

....Where Emma and Sophia discuss an article that cites a poll where the marjoity of Americans no longer believe that anyone can achieve the American Dream.

Welcome back to Flyover Features on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, a witty radio show where we discuss current events in culture through the lens of an article. I am Emma Verini, and I'm here with Sophia Mann. Today we will be discussing an article in The Independent called Death to the American Dream. Cole finds most hard work no longer guarantees economic gain. The majority of Americans say the prior generation has an easier time buying a home, starting a business, or being a full-time parent by Rachel Dobkin on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025. So let's just go over what this article argues. I do think there's a strange divergence in the end of the article that's just completely irrelevant to what the article talks about.

Well, it is irrelevant, but I think there's also a little bit of cognitive dissonance among the people who are sort of complaining about the state of the economy and how they don't think that hard work guarantee success and their views on things like immigration and housing and stuff like that. So we'll get into that. But basically, this article is based around a poll, which has found that most United States adults agree that hard work doesn't guarantee economic gain, crushing the long-held cultural belief known as the American Dream. That is, is the quote of the lead in this article here. It goes on to talk about a joke that's been circulating TikTok.

I know I've certainly seen it on platforms other than TikTok, where these sort of millennials, Gen Z people, joke that boomers could have bought their house back when they bought it in like the 50s or 60s or 70s with a handful of raspberries or a, you know, a handful of box of black. blueberries or whatever. Also, I realized I just said 50s and I don't think the boomers were buying houses in the 50s unless they were extremely young. But you know what I mean. Well, yeah, they're buying the houses that the people who live in them now are renting and struggling to pay rent on.

Yes, that's that is definitely true. And I agree. It is so much harder to buy a house nowadays. and it, you know, just looking at the past 15 years, we just have been stagnant pretty much for the vast majority of people. And home rates have gone up, like the cost of buying a house has gone up like by a factor of two, sometimes three in a lot of these cities. I know where I live, there's a small house that's on the corner of a road near me. And I think it used to be worth like $100,000, and in the past 10 years, it's gone up to a price of like $600,000. So, I mean, and it's not even a nice house. It's just like kind of a cruddy house on the side of the road. It's very small. I can't imagine that's more than 1,500 square feet. And I mean, there's nothing

that's like particularly nice about it. But I always used to think when I was younger and I, you know, dreamed of buying a house. I used to think, well, $600,000 is going to get me a really, really nice house. And now it doesn't really get you a nice house. I don't know what your thoughts on that are as we sort of go down this article. It's just insane how much things are these days. I will say that it's generally way too much everywhere, but there's a pretty huge variation between certain parts of the country too. Like, oh my goodness, city living and the cost of living in a city is just insane. And you will look at houses and say L.A. that are not. not nice houses and there'll be like a million in not even a great area. And I just, it's like,

I don't know how people can afford to live there. I mean, they clearly can't or struggling to get by or they're behind on their bills. And it's really tragic and sad, honestly, because, I mean, it's not their fault that you're in conditions where things are that extreme of expensive. But yeah, I remember it was crazy. I was, I made something like, oh, about 4,500. when I was doing a 12-week internship in D.C. And I was not, you know, wildly fluid with my money. And I didn't break even. I made a bit of money, but it was not a lot.

And that was with rent that was on the cheaper end of the spectrum because it was for, it was at the Hillsdale House, which is a place that Hillsdale College rents to students. And it's still like, even with that, the cost of food and everything, it's just. The cost of living in the Hillsdale House, by the way, the rent, if you're a student at Hillsdale living in D.C. is artificially low. Like, the college does cover part of what the cost of living would be because it's just so cheap to live in those houses. Well, I'm saying it's artificially low, but it still shows just how expensive it is to live these days. Because I was not living dramatically. And I'm very grateful to them for that house. And it was like, wow, I did not have much money left over.

can't imagine they have something called unpaid internships in DC. Yeah. What the heck? That's just basically like giving away thousands of dollars for to do an internship. Like, that's a scary situation actually for me, like just not making any money for three months. Yeah, I can't imagine doing that. And obviously, like, maybe I would still consider an unped internship, but it would have to be a really good opportunity, you know. But there are some people who are, I guess, desperate enough for an internship that they're willing to take those. So, yeah. Well, there are some seemingly good internships that are unpaid. It's just like, I don't have the money to basically spend like, I don't know, $4,000 to pay for an internship. So I'm very glad that mine actually was paid because I didn't really make money, but I didn't lose money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, I guess we can address sort of the elephant in the room with this article, which is like the very end part where it says, and I'll read it. On Monday, protesters gathered at hundreds of events across the country, not only to support workers, but also to denounce the Trump administration.

Demonstrators protested against issues, including the president's mass migrant deportations and government spending cuts made by tech billionaire Elon Musk's Doge Department of Government Efficiency. The New York Times reported. Okay. Sort of seems random, considering the fact that most of this article is talking about how. there's basically a poll that revealed that Americans don't think hard work guarantee success. And then at the end, it's talking about how these people who are protesting this issue, you know, supposedly protesting this issue, are against deportations. You're listening to Flyover Features on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.

Which doesn't make a lot of sense because it's pretty commonly acknowledged that the more immigrants you let into a country, the harder it is for the Americans who are already living in this country to get jobs. I mean, it's just, it's pretty obvious that if you bring in more people, there are less jobs to go around. I mean, what do you, what do you think about that? I mean, I think that's a true statement. I also think that the people protesting or probably not making the connection or realizing that, because my guess is that it's a broad protest where they understand or they have this perspective of being against,

generally speaking, oppression by elites and fighting kind of more for the common working man, which would them include immigrants, both legal and illegal. But I don't think they realize that, you know, I mean, I do think it's a simple answer that they don't make the mental connection, that there is problems with mass immigration, comes to people being able to find houses and whatnot, especially in, you know, like, cities and the like.

Like, I do think where I live in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where I grew up mid-sized town, I'm not going to say that none of that's happening, but, like, the reason why house prices are rising there, I think would mostly be because of, like, inflation and, like, poor economic realities, maybe broadly caused by immigration, but not in that specific community. There's not a lot of immigrants there. And it's also odd because the picture has people saying workers over billionaires. And they talk about not just supporting workers, but denouncing the Trump administration. But they denounce mass immigration deportation and government spending cuts made my tech billionaires doge.

But it's odd to me because it's like, generally speaking, I would consider people who work for the Fed to kind of be more elite. So like, I don't know, man, you're getting rid of like Fed elites and now that's not okay. And I actually am mixed about Doge because I think government waste and spending is a huge deal. However, from what I've heard, it's not actually taking away as much as one would think or as much as it was promised. And I do feel morally mixed. I'm not going to say, because I have a big heart and a joke about this a lot, but it's true that like I don't actually feel bad for people who do lose their jobs because of, government cuts, even if it's, in my opinion, a bloated system. I feel bad for the individual person. But it is still odd because, again, ultimately, I guess it's a long-waded way of saying,

generally speaking, I consider people who work for the federal government to broadly be more elite and educated and work in higher positions of power. So it's like, hmm, they just don't want those elites or something like that. You know, it's something that's even more like contradictory in this line of logic is that people say that they don't support tech billionaires. But it's a lot of these tech billionaires that are actually trying to push for more immigration because it benefits them. I mean, that's definitely true of Elon Musk. Look at his position on immigration.

He's definitely pro-legal immigration. And he has a very different view from Trump and a lot of Trump supporters. And so if you really wanted to. oppose these tech billionaires, you definitely would want to take a different stance on immigration. I think what you said is true. These people literally just don't draw the line in their head. It seems pretty obvious to us, but it probably isn't to them. I mean, something I would mention is that when you think about the Democrats in the 90s, for instance, they were very pro-worker. And two of the things that they took a stance against

were free trade, which is what Donald Trump is doing right now, and immigration, which is what Donald Trump is doing right now. It's just, I think the left has become much more confused in what their position is. And they sort of hold these dissonant ideas in their head and they're conflicting. But they literally have not even taken a second to realize or think that maybe what they believe just is incoherent. I think that's very fair and true. And I do think that that 90s Democrat statistic block that you're talking about, one thing that's notable. I may even said this before is how I believe with Trump's last presidency, one of the heads of the major unions there announced that they were voting for Trump or endorsing him because they thought he had kind of the left kind of betrayed the working man or the common man. And I feel like we're seeing a split.

It's not always this way. And maybe it's a stereotype. but I sort of feel like there's a stereotype in my head now to someone's a blue collar working person or like in the trades. They're on average politically more conservative. And it's like on average the elites in academia that are more that way. And that's a really weird thing to notice how like views switch or whatever because I think both the late rest in peace, very sad about it genuinely. Charlie Kirk and Chris Rufo both seem to also have that anti-elitist. stance. That's definitely true.

Including for like, and more of a, more of a working man. I mean, I think in, in, in, Kirk's case, cakes explicitly. Yeah. I mean, and if you look at, like, a lot of the stuff Charlie Kirk has said, he, for instance, endorsed people going to trade school as opposed to going to get a college education. Obviously, part of the reason he said that was because, oh, colleges are corrupt, stuff like that. But I think it's very interesting to sort of trace the, the way that trend has evolved over time the way that people who might have been Democrats in the 1990s because the Democrat Party did support their interests are now Trump supporters. Yeah. Well, that's another thing that's kind of more complicated to me is obviously I don't like the right left distinction, but I would identify

more on the right. And I am not a fan of tech billionaires, generally speaking. I am not a Peter Teal fan. I am not a Musk fan. But I feel like when I hear critiques from people that are more more like dissident to the point of really not supporting the mainstream aspects of it anymore, dissident left and kind of right that are against it, that to me is like a more coherent argument, you know? Yeah. Like you can disagree with how they've come, but they're not holding contradictory views. Like if you're a very religious traditional person, you're not going to love Musk because

he supports transhumanism and certain ways of viewing the country. that, well, are bluntly not Christian. And then if you're like very dissident left, you're not going to like him, but in probably a more coherent way for perhaps some overlap, but, you know, similar reasons. I mean, I think those groups both do have weird areas of overlap and not being a fan of AI or technological progress either. But, yeah, it's really strange how those views have shifted. Although I also notice slightly, and this could be because we're in a weird academic bubble, at least at Hillsdale, that it's still niche.

But I'm noticing a rise of like niche right-wing academic people too. Like that definitely seems more prominent. Yes, that definitely is. You're listening to Flyover Features on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I did want to touch on one more thing. This might seem a little bit off topic, but I think it'll become clear why I brought it up. Something I noticed about this article and a lot of arguments that are similar to this article is that they place a very strong emphasis on hard work. And I do think that we might plan on doing a show on hard work culture in America.

Unfortunately, we don't have time to touch on that right now. But nonetheless, I do think that there has been a greater shift toward an emphasis on hard work within the last 50 years. And obviously, like Alexis de Tocqueville talks about how Americans are, you know, more democratic and that they don't exactly support the idea of leisure the way that like the aristocracy in Europe did. And we sort of broke from that. That's, I mean, that's sort of something I would like to touch on later. But, I mean, for the time being, I do think that one of the reasons people are finding that they have to work so hard in order to succeed is because we have. we have sort of rejected, I guess the best way to put it would be we have rejected tests of intelligence or approximations of intelligence in the workforce. So instead of taking a examination

or something when you enter the workforce or even for school, you have to basically present, you have to present evidence of why you're competent enough to hold a job. And so what that ends up looking like is you have to go get your master's or you have to go to school for all this time. Whereas what we used to have was actually we would have what it's called is G-loaded assessments. So assessments that are really good at approximating general intelligence. And people could take those and move up in the workforce. And that has been phased out as a result of a case called Griggs v. Duke Power, which basically that was what established disparate impact. And that's sort of going off topic. But basically,

these assessments are racist because white people are more likely to do well on them and get promoted. And so now, as a result of this sort of thing, we have an emphasis on, well, we can't, you know, approximate employees or students' intelligence using these racist examinations. So therefore, we have to have them work really hard to prove that they're competent. And so we've had this emphasis it's on hard work. People are picking up 60 hours a week a week at work, or they have to do all this extracurricular, or they feel like they have to do three internships while they're an undergraduate. I mean, that used to not be the case. And now, as we've abandoned these assessments, students and young people have really felt the weight of having to do a bunch of work in order to demonstrate

their competence. And I think this is a huge problem. I think. that honestly I think this is going to get overturned. I don't think that hopefully, hopefully one can hope that this is not going to, you know, exist for much longer. It's really hard because general intelligence tests and getting tons of internships on Lincoln just sounds so stressful. And I just try to be accepting of myself and what really matters to me. But it's a hard and stressful and competitive life when everyone's trying to get the most amount of internships or the most impressive. And it just feels like you never, it's like this life encourages you to never slow down and think. And it's kind of sad. Modernity is so fast-paced and competitive. And it's like,

now that we have access to computers and can see what people post, it's almost like heightened competition. It's not made us more necessarily egalitarian. It's gone like opposite extremes. And Sometimes it feels like it's gone the negative sides of both extremes of hierarchy and egalitarianism and how we all have access to seeing and hearing about all these different types of view. But then we all are comparing ourselves obsessively to these other people and subtly certain institutions or whatnot are more inclined to support people who hold their own views and whatnot. It's like this horrific comparison cycle. Another thing that this article mentions that I thought was interesting and depressing was how in the poll, They said nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream, an idea that no matter who you are and where you're from, if you work hard enough, you will achieve your goals in America

is no longer true or what I thought was more shocking and that I'm surprised I didn't elaborate on never was. So there's people that think it was just a fantasy and never was a real thing or a real ideal to begin with. And who knows? I don't know for sure. But I certainly hear my elders seemed to speak positively still of America and what they've achieved. And my grandfather was an immigrant. And he loved the culture there. He helped people on their feet whose lives had gone south, as he would say. He trained people for job training maybe after they had had gone through hard things,

like with drugs or the like or things like that. And, you know, he was from Canada, which is not exactly. you know, a country like South Africa or India in terms of its struggles. And even then, he still had so much appreciation for it. So I do think a small part of it has to be, I do hope people realize. I'm not going to say things aren't bad. But your baseline standard of living is still like, thank God you're not starving. I mean, yeah, but it is sad that there seems to be this increased amount of nihilism and lack of hope to believe it never was a thing.

is more shocking than believing you can't achieve it right now, which might be legitimate because of problems with the economy or other varying concerns. That's all we have time for today. You're listening to Flyover Features on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Emma and I'm here with Sophia.