If you only read the title of the blog entry, you're wasting your time and missing the important details.
I know I just jammed a big huge red button, but this really needs to be written. It's very important for understanding progressive ideology. First, who invented the phrase "American Dream"? It was James Truslow Adams.
What, exactly, did he write? See, what the progressives don't want you and I to do is to actually go and pick up some of these books and commit the heinous act of actually reading them. In The Epic of America, Page 404, he writes:
If, as I have said, the things already listed were all we had had to contribute, America would have made no distinctive and unique gift to mankind. But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
That's what's most commonly quoted from Adams' book. I bolded the phrase a dream of social order, because this phrase - this is a tip off that a scam is being perpetrated. It's a huge red flag. Conservatives don't talk this way. Moderates don't talk this way either. It's radicals and ideologues who are endlessly obsessed with the "social order" - the "social this" and "social that" and the more equitable.... Here. See for yourself.
James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, page 410: (Yes, this link goes to the original 1931 edition, though in snippet form. Alt link so you can read it.)
If the American dream is to come true and to abide with us, it will, at bottom, depend on the people themselves. If we are to achieve a richer and fuller life for all, they have got to know what such an achievement implies. In a modern industrial State, an economic base is essential for all. We point with pride to our "national income," but the nation is only an aggregate of individual men and women, and when we turn from the single figure of total income to the incomes of individuals, we find there was a very marked injustice in its distribution. There is no reason why wealth, which is a social product, should not be more equitably controlled and distributed in the interests of society.
There's your "American Dream" as originally constituted. It's wealth redistribution and big government. No, really, I don't want you to believe me. Click the link and open the book. See it for yourself. Know it, because you've read what was actually written. With progressives, with any one of their undertakings it almost always comes back to wealth redistribution. Without fail.
This is why I keep trying to provide the original sources, the actual links to the hard copy - and urge conservatives to pick up these books, and read them. We're being lied to on a massive scale, and it only takes about 10 minutes or so to come up with the truth. This is actually really simple and easy. The time consuming part is the reading of the books and discussing, educating others about the realities of progressivism. And, we'll all be so much better off for it.
If a progressive is crowing about something, about how great something is, chances are that if you go back to the original source it won't take you very long to put the lie to everything they're promoting. Everything about progressives is a house of cards. Can we please knock the cards over now?
http://tinyurl.com/zpgb2sf
