American Dream Blogging Assignment (Due Wednesday Night at 10:00pm)

For your next post, I'd like you to reflect on the American Dream as an ideology--as a set of assumptions about American opportunity and capitalism as YOU encountered them growing up. In other words, I'd like you to reflect on how you were socialized into whatever social class you felt a part of (or dissented from) in growing up. What level of success seemed possible to you, or is expected from you? Do you believe in the American Dream today, or do you see it as a myth, a false promise? What was expected from you as far as work ethic, independence, educational level? Were you expected to exceed the position of your parents? Did your parents have any "downclass" fears--anxieties about "keeping up," or lapsing into a lower class, perhaps by marriage, or through badly chosen friends? My mom's downclass fears came out in the form of grammar policing--people who could not speak "correctly" were seen as sort of slovenly and careless--a class to be avoided! How else did class, class identity, or class anxieties figure in your upbringing? Write a healthy paragraph or two with some analysis.

If you would rather not discuss your own family in this public forum, then comment on the American Dream instead...is it still with us? Is there anything particularly "American" about it? Is it a myth? etc.

Everybody loves to play...Hell in a Handbasket!

Hey all--your first blogging assignment will be based on a discussion from the end of Chapter 13 that caught my eye. Kendall there contrasts the Functionalist notion of "pluralism," where political power is dispersed among many competing groups, with the Conflict theorists' "elite model," where political power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of economic and political "elites."

In one or two meaty, well crafted, but not too long, paragraphs, I would like you to answer the question, which is it? Which description is closest to reality as you see it? Is power in American society widely distributed and shared among many groups who might be said to check, or balance, each other's power, just as James Madison, the founding father who wrote the system of checks and balances into the U.S. constitution, would have had it? Or is America an exercise in domination by a small number of corporate and executive branch "power elites"? Or is the answer somewhere in between?

Noam Chomsky, the radical leftist MIT professor, has famously grouped Republicans and Democrats together as two "factions of the Business Party," suggesting that neither party truly represents the interests of those citizens who Kendall, echoing Marx, calls "the unorganized masses who are relatively powerless and vulnerable to economic and political exploitation." Chomsky's formulation seems a sarcastic version of the elite model, of course, and suggests that America is to him a failed democracy, or plutocracy in which leaders pay lip service to democratic ideals, but really look out primarily for their own class. This is a harsh view--do you think it is justified? Overstated out of frustration? If this view is at all compelling to you, in what do you place your hopes for the future?

Welcome to Todd's Issues

Welcome--this is a test post.