Pretending Everything Is Fine Won’t Save The American Dream

As the Democrat Party becomes increasingly controlled by self-admitted socialists, the right has mostly responded in one of two ways. The libertarian old guard has adopted the strategy of loudly and repeatedly pointing out the socialist left’s socialism, framing the issue as a 1980s-era battle between red commies and free markets. The populist new right, full of young voters suffering from the same economic hardships that disillusioned their leftist counterparts, believes you can’t beat the socialists until you start “making people’s lives better,” as Vice President J.D. Vance put it on Thursday.

“You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market,” Vance said on Fox News’ The Will Cain Show. “As much as I love the free market, you stop socialism by making people’s lives better.”

At odds with Vance are those like podcaster Ben Shapiro, who dismisses that approach as a “utopian scheme” propagated by “demoralization agents.” In response to the growing affordability crisis, Shapiro’s answer is to double down on “free markets” and to promise struggling young people that the American Dream is still plenty accessible as long as “you work hard.”

Shapiro’s ideology makes a lot more sense if you understand it as a ChatGPT-esque AI bot, but trained entirely on 2003-era GOP talking points and ignorant of everything that happened since. It all sounds nice, until you talk to anyone normal and see it’s completely divorced from actual reality.

The American Dream was a promise that if you worked hard, you could make it no matter the circumstances you were born into. But that promise has been inaccessible to tens of millions for decades, due in large part to policies Shapiro himself pushed. Take mass immigration, for example.

“I don’t give a good damn about the so-called ‘browning of America,’” he said in 2017, as the country was flooded with third-world H-1Bs and refugees from the Middle East wars he demanded. And before he comes in and says he was only talking about the need to care about ideology more than ethnicity, the third world only has one ideology: the ideology that elects people like Zohran Mamdani to loot people like me.

There are no Zohran Mamdanis without mass immigration. But the problem is even bigger than that.

White men in this country have been systematically locked out of the American Dream for decades. They fought its wars and forcibly bailed out its corrupt bankers, only to find themselves passed over for job after job because they didn’t pass corporate America’s diversity tests.

And the free market? A market that allows the mass importation of low-cost slave labor subsidized by its country of origin for the purpose of boxing out the men whose families built the nation and died for its freedom isn’t free in any meaningful sense.

Or let’s talk about housing. The American Dream was the idea that if you worked hard enough and saved, you could buy a house near your parents and grandparents. You could raise your kids and watch them ride their bikes down the street to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Your kids might even go to college one day.

After decades of artificially easy money, which simultaneously ballooned housing prices while making the dollars those men saved worth less and less, those homes are now beyond unaffordable. They’ll never be able to save the money necessary for the down payment, let alone afford the mortgage payment.

And forget about retirement. The manufacturing base that made careers at and pensions from one company is long gone, sold to China, which immediately stole all the IP and then started dumping the same products, but of much lower quality, back into the U.S. at below-market prices, once again subsidized by one of America’s foremost global enemies. At least Wall Street got rich off the offshoring of the American economy.

And college? You can again forget about that. Good luck affording $50,000/year, assuming your child even gets admitted ahead of a blue-haired they/them or an illegal immigrant somehow getting subsidized in-state tuition, all for the privilege of your child being taught he’s racist and evil because of the color of his skin.

And forget even discussing health care, the least-free free market in history. For those who are blessed enough to afford a home, you can guarantee their health insurance premiums alone are higher now than their mortgage payments. And that’s before the insane deductibles kick in.

Does anybody believe in 2026 that if a straight, white, Christian man “works hard and makes smart and virtuous decisions,” he will be allowed to partake in the American Dream? Because if you believe that right now, you are nuts. Some may squeak through the cracks and make it big in spite of the filters designed to keep them out, but those are the exception, not the rule.

Is the American Dream dead forever? Absolutely not. The solutions are actually really simple. But to get to the point where we can implement them requires us to tell the truth about the current situation rather than spewing nonsense about a country that hasn’t existed in decades.

Shapiro says this “process requires free markets, free minds, equal justice before law, and social fabric.”

The major markets in this country are not free. Free minds are systematically targeted and punished. Equal justice is a joke, and if you disagree, I have two words for you: Anthony Fauci. And the social fabric? It’s been ripped to shreds by 50 years of mass immigration of a magnitude that makes assimilation impossible.

This is bigger than Shapiro, or Tucker Carlson, or Israel, or Iran, or whatever stupid pet issue or personality the eye-poppingly rich podcast class is currently obsessed with.

Our country lives or dies based on how we address the very real problems that have put the American Dream far out of reach for most people in this country. What won’t solve those problems is lying about them and pretending everything is just fine, using ridiculous talking points that bear zero resemblance to what’s actually happening on the ground in this country right now.

Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].