# data[].attributes.body
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZLxAoUTFVVu95O06W47Xj5cA8tbEWb-X40h2ooQbwRU/edit?usp=sharing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New Piktochart | Piktochart Visual Editor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Courtney E. Martin: The new American Dream

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the first time in history, the majority of American parents don't think their kids will be better off than they were. This shouldn't be a cause for alarm, says journalist Courtney E. Martin. Rather, it's an opportunity to define a new approach to work and family that emphasizes community and creativity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the recession, the American Dream is alive, if not entirely well, according to a poll by The New York Times and CBS News.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1931, when writer James Truslow Adams coined the term "the American Dream," it had more to do with idealism than material prosperity. The American Dream, he wrote in The American Epic (a book glowingly reviewed in the 's December 1931 issue), was "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." Despite Truslow's tidy summation, the ideals that America is supposed to represent have always been contested. Over the years, a number of Atlantic writers have tackled the subject, offering a wide array of perspectives, and sometimes raising more questions than answers.

In 1881, the prominent Boston philanthropist Kate Gannet Wells characterized Americanism as, "the fixed conviction that one man is the equivalent of another in capacity, and that his failure to prove it by results is the consequence of circumstances beyond his control." This was an outlook, according to Wells, that cut both ways: "It is this fixed belief which constitutes the essence of American impudence, boasting, aggressiveness, want of grace, and knock-you-down manner. It is also the source of our sturdy independence, our valuation of character as the final estimate."

Other Atlantic writers have pointed out another unique feature of American Nationalism. Unlike the deep-seated tribal loyalties found across Europe, American patriotism is an artificial construct. On the eve of America's entrance into World War I, a time of mass immigration and demographic upheaval, essayist Agnes Repplier emphasized the importance of cultivating a shared national vision. In "Americanism" (1916), she drew a sharp contrast between the United States and the nations of the old world:

Of all the countries in the world, we and we only have any need to create artificially the patriotism which is the birthright of other nations. Into the hearts of six millions of foreign-born men-less than half of them naturalized-we must infuse that quality of devotion which will make them place the good of the state above their personal good.

Yet not all writers were so convinced of the fragility and tenuousness of the bonds that unify Americans. When French journalist Raoul De Roussy De Sales turned his eye to America, he discovered a nation with a well-defined, almost brash identity. In his 1939 essay "What Makes an American," he brought an outsider's view reminiscent of de Tocqueville:

America is a permanent protest against the rest of the world, and particularly against Europe.... This faith, like all faiths, does not engender a passive attitude toward the rest of the world. Americans are tolerant of all creeds and to all convictions, but few people express their distrust and indignation with more vigor whenever some of their beliefs are offended. Few people are more conscious that ideas may be more destructive than guns.

De Sales was fascinated by America's conception of itself as a framework of ideas-one that remained as vivid and meaningful to its present-day inhabitants as it had to its founders.

Curiously enough, in a country where material changes are extraordinarily rapid, this moral and political frame has the stability of dogma. For instance, America is the only country in the world which pretends to listen to the teaching of its founders as if they were still alive. Political battles of today are fought with arguments based on the speeches of writings of men dead over a century ago. Most Americans behave, in fact, as if men like Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and many others could be called up on the phone for advice. Their wisdom is considered as eternal as that of the Biblical prophets.

Atlantic contributors addressed, too, the inevitable conflicts that emerge when American realities fall short of American ideals. In his 1988 article "The Return of Inequality," Thomas Byrne Edsall warned that the country's growing gulf between the affluent and middle classes was anathema to the American Dream. "Its manifestations are subtle: marginally frustrated hopes, a mocking disparity between the good life available to the few and the life that many settle for-resignation, guilt, social helplessness." This inequality, he argued, also undermined the conviction that "Egalitarianism has been the Democratic answer to Marxism."

Ultimately, Eleanor Roosevelt may have summarized America's uniqueness in the most compelling words. In her Cold War-era essay "What Has Happened to the American Dream?" (1961), Roosevelt expressed deep concern about America's image abroad, and lamented the creeping influence of Soviet Russia. "The future will be determined by the young," she asserted, "and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American Dream." But what exactly was this dream? Perhaps, she suggested, its appeal lies in its very mutability-in the fact that it is expansive enough to allow each of us to draw inspiration from it in our own way:

No single individual ... and no single group has an exclusive claim to the American dream. But we have all, I think, a single vision of what it is, not merely as a hope and an aspiration, but as a way of life, which we can come ever closer to attaining it its ideal form if we keep shining and unsullied our purpose and our belief in its essential value.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Articles by Eleanor Roosevelt and others take up the question of what constitutes the American ideal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After the British writer G. K. Chesterton visited the United States for the first time, he remarked that America was "a nation with the soul of a church."

Mr. Chesterton wasn't referring to the nation's religiosity but to its formation around a set of core political beliefs enshrined in founding "sacred texts," like the Declaration of Independence. He noted that the United States, unlike European countries, did not rely on ethnic kinship, cultural character or a "national type" for a shared identity.

The profoundness of the American experiment, he argued, was that it aspired to create "a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles" united by voluntary assent to commonly held political beliefs.

But recent survey data provides troubling evidence that a shared sense of national identity is unraveling, with two mutually exclusive narratives emerging along party lines. At the heart of this divide are opposing reactions to changing demographics and culture. The shock waves from these transformations - harnessed effectively by Donald Trump's campaign - are reorienting the political parties from the more familiar liberal-versus-conservative alignment to new poles of cultural pluralism and monism.

An Associated Press-NORC poll found nearly mirror-opposite partisan reactions to the question of what kind of culture is important for American identity. Sixty-six percent of Democrats, compared with only 35 percent of Republicans, said the mixing of cultures and values from around the world was extremely or very important to American identity. Similarly, 64 percent of Republicans, compared with 32 percent of Democrats, saw a culture grounded in Christian religious beliefs as extremely or very important.

These divergent orientations can also be seen in a recent poll by P.R.R.I. that explored partisan perceptions of which groups are facing discrimination in the country. Like Americans overall, large majorities of Democrats believe minority groups such as African-Americans, immigrants, Muslims and gay and transgender people face a lot of discrimination in the country. Only about one in five Democrats say that majority groups such as Christians or whites face a lot of discrimination.

Republicans, on the other hand, are much less likely than Democrats to believe any minority group faces a lot of discrimination, and they believe Christians and whites face roughly as much discrimination as immigrants, Muslims and gay and transgender people. Moreover, only 27 percent of Republicans say blacks experience a lot of discrimination, while 43 percent say whites do and 48 percent say the same of Christians.

Taken as a whole, these partisan portraits highlight contrasting responses to the country's changing demographics and culture, especially over the past decade as the country has ceased to be a majority white Christian nation - from 54 percent in 2008 to 43 percent today. Democrats - only 29 percent of whom are white and Christian - are embracing these changes as central to their vision of an evolving American identity that is strengthened and renewed by diversity. By contrast, Republicans - nearly three-quarters of whom identify as white and Christian - see these changes eroding a core white Christian American identity and perceive themselves to be under siege as the country changes around them.

Americans of both political parties sense the unraveling of a broadly shared consensus of American identity, although they cite different reasons for feeling that way. About seven in 10 Republicans and Democrats fear that the United States is losing its national identity, the A.P.-NORC survey found. The two political parties may not share much, but each is increasingly aware that the other has embraced a radically different vision of America's identity and future.

These responses are shifting the political magnetic field that defines the parties. Republican leaders are finding strong support among their base for the Trump administration's executive order barring travel to the United States from particular Muslim-majority countries. But their plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act was dramatically derailed by factions within their own party.

Democrats, on the other hand, are enjoying energetic backing from their base for pro-immigration and pro-L.G.B.T. stances, but they are experiencing increasing opposition to their support for free trade.

There have been other times in our history when the fabric of American identity was stretched in similar ways - the Civil War, heightened levels of immigration at the turn of the 20th century and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s.

But during these eras, white Christians were still secure as a demographic and cultural majority in the nation. The question at stake was whether they were going to make room for new groups at a table they still owned. Typically, a group would gain its seat in exchange for assimilation to the majority culture. But as white Christians have slipped from the majority over the past decade, this familiar strategy is no longer viable.

White Christians are today struggling to face a new reality: the inevitable surrender of table ownership in exchange for an equal seat. And it's this new higher-stakes challenge that is fueling the great partisan reorientation we are witnessing today.

The temptation for the Republican Party, especially with Donald Trump in the White House, is to double down on a form of white Christian nationalism, which treats racial and religious identity as tribal markers and defends a shrinking demographic with increasingly autocratic assertions of power.

For its part, the Democratic Party is contending with the difficulties of organizing its more diverse coalition while facing its own tribal temptations to embrace an identity politics that has room to celebrate every group except whites who strongly identify as Christian. If this realignment continues, left out of this opposition will be a significant number of whites who are both wary of white Christian nationalism and weary of feeling discounted in the context of identity politics.

This end is not inevitable, but if we are to continue to make one out of many, leaders of both parties will have to step back from the reactivity of the present and take up the more arduous task of weaving a new national narrative in which all Americans can see themselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | The Collapse of American Identity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After the British writer G. K. Chesterton visited the United States for the first time, he remarked that America was "a nation with the soul of a church." Mr. Chesterton wasn't referring to the nation's religiosity but to its formation around a set of core political beliefs enshrined in founding "sacred texts," like the Declaration of Independence.