This was the day General Motors came to the end of the road. I once asked a Sudanese politician to name the thing that in his eyes proved a nation was a nation. He didn’t hesitate: ‘The ability to make cars.’ Britain was a nation because it made Jaguars. Germany was a nation because of Volkswagen. America ran the world because of General Motors. Italy made Fiats and France made Peugeots, Japan made Toyotas, and even the Russians, struggling along the highway towards modernity, had the easily underestimated Lada.

We love driving and we hate it, we praise it and we slate it, but our relationship with cars is a lively element in our relationship with ourselves and other people. The downturn in the industry chills us, but mainly because – and we don’t feel this way about pharmaceuticals or petrochemicals – it makes us imagine we might have to stop being who we are.

The car is America’s desirable object par excellence, a feast for advertisers, partly because selling cars is like selling citizens a part of themselves. In the AMC series Mad Men the central character, Donald Draper, is a senior creative at Sterling Cooper, a top-flight Madison Avenue advertising firm in the early 1960s. What was his grounding for this station? He was a car salesman in a former life, with the stress on former life, and a different man altogether. Like the characters in On the Road, you feel that Draper is an individualist for whom cars, those chariots of desire, symbolise the entire possibility of becoming somebody.

Er Danmark overhovedet en nation når nu vi ikke laver biler?

Den anden artikel er endnu ikke på nettet, men findes fra side 113 af juli/august nummeret af The Atlantic. Det er Benjamin Schwarz’s anmeldelse af Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963, ottende bind af Kevin Starrs episke værk om Californien, Americans and the California Dream. Efterkrigstiden var en periode hvor Californien fik realiseret en særlig variant af den amerikanske drøm, som Starr identificerer som den californiske drøm, hvor ethvert medlem af middelklassen fik adgang til et godt hus på en ikke alt for stor grund, en bil, gode veje, utallige offentlige parker og strande, og nogle af verdens bedste biblioteks- og skolesystemer, herunder University of California, Berkeley, stadig verdens bedste offentlige universitet, men nok ikke længere det bedste, punktum.

Nøglecitater:

In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles’s working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states. This affluence ushered in an era of exhilerating if headlong growth and free spending. The state’s public schools—the new, modernist elementary schools with their flat roots, gleaming clerestory windows, and outdoor lockers; the grand comprehensive high schools … were the envy of the nation. Berkeley, the flagship campus in the UC system, emerged as the best university in the country, probably the world. It was a sweet, vivacious time: California’s children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and—thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine—were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it’s a time irretrievably lost.

Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class—the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners, who defined the long-underindustrialized state culturally and politically. But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination (and thereby helped define middle-class aspirations and in ideal of domestic life that survives to this day) and how the Golden State—fleetingly, as it turns out—accommodated Americans’ “conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life.”

To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. … Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had—by those Starr calls the “fiercely competitive.” That’s just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That’s a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California’s dream—and of the promise of American life. As R. H. Tawney wrote, “Opportunities to rise, which can, of their very nature, be seized only by the few,” cannot “substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization which are needed by all men whether they rise or not.”

En dansk læser vil måske bemærke at det der her beskrives som den californiske drøm ikke helt er det samme som hvad vi traditionelt opfatter som den amerikanske drøm. Den amerikanske drøm indebærer netop at de dygtigste og mest konkurrencemindede kan opnå ufattelig rigdom eller i hvert fald et Godt Liv. Skildringer af den amerikanske drøm nævner sjældent hvad der sker med de ikke så heldige, men der er ikke nogen tvivl om at den amerikanske drøm ikke er særlig egalitær.

Den amerikanske middelklasses angst blev et tema i valgkampen sidste år og fortjener i hvert fald at blive et emne til en fremtidig Publius podcast. Og på et tidspunkt skal Steffen og jeg også tage os sammen til at læse Jules Witcovers The Year the Dream Died, om begivenhederne i 1968 og hvad der kan anses som slutningen på den californiske drøm.