The American Dream.
I believe a lot of what separates Right and Left is not whether one side or the other believes in it, but rather how each side DEFINES it.
When I look at Occupy Wall Street and the response to it from the Right, and compare it with the Tea Party and what they stand for, it's clear that we're not all talking about the same American Dream.
It seems to me that to the Left, and I think for most Americans, it means 'If I work hard, and play by the rules, I can have a good life, a home, a decent retirement, education for my children, and that their lives can be even better than mine'. I think that's how most of our parents would define it, but they grew up in a different time. When they were young, there was no minimum wage, no 40 hour work week, no ban on child labor, no employer-paid health insurance, no Social Security, no Medicare. They endured the Great Depression and saw how events beyond the control of any individual could destroy their economic security. They watched as their parents lost homes, lost their life's savings, sometimes had to move the whole family back in with their own parents.
For them, I think, the American Dream was realized in that they not only had lives better than their parents, but also they saw the lives of their children were better still.
On the left, we expand this, and we see the success of a society in the extent to which this is true for the majority of its members.
From years of observation, including a decade debating politics with Conservatives on the Bowsite, I think that the Right sees the American Dream as "I can get RICH!!!"
In these discussions, I often found myself dumfounded at the extent to which my opponents saw things solely in terms of individuals. Back in 2006, for example, one of them declared that the economy was doing 'extremely well', and when I pointed out that incomes for most people were flat to declining, he countered that I was wrong, because our economy was producing so many rich people. Others said that those people whose incomes were stagnant had nobody to blame but themselves.
Anyone, they said, could get an education, work hard, and move up.
Yes, I countered, ANYONE can do that, but EVERYONE can't. They couldn't understand that. They seemed unable to grasp that the lower 50% of the income scale cannot move en masse into the upper 50% of income. For them, it was always about the individual, and whether an individual can better himself, and how many people could become fabulously wealthy. For them the economy was succeeding because more people were getting rich. For me it was failing because more people were getting poor, and many who were NOT poor were struggling harder and harder to simply stay afloat.
This seems to me to be one of the defining differences between Liberals and Conservatives. The former see the success of a society in terms of reducing the number of poor people, and whether life is improving for most people, whereas the former seem to see it in terms of increasing the number of rich people and whether those rich people can get richer and richer.