preview

The Decline of the American Dream Essay

Best Essays

On a brisk September day in 2011, in the commercial district of Manhattan Island, a minute protest in Liberty Square commenced against the fiscal atrocities committed by economic establishments leading to the financial crisis and subsequent economic recession in 2007 and 2008. Over the course of the month, the movement protesting the miscarriage of justice and democracy following the economic catastrophe and the overall inequitable and unfair wealth distribution diffused to over 100 American cities as well as 1,500 cities worldwide. The revolutionary movement was named Occupy Wall Street and through occupying and protesting the symbolic location of the financial elite, Wall Street, the crusade aimed to “[revolt] against the corrosive power …show more content…

This would change with the election of General Andrew Jackson, and thus commencing the Era of the Common Man in which the commoners in the United States gained extensive political power through enfranchisement. Andrew Jackson's humble beginnings and policies to expand the franchise to include all men regardless of property requisites epitomized the common man’s victory over the privileged aristocrats who prevailed in politics during the nation's beginning era. During Andrew Jackson's presidency, a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the developing country to “gain knowledge of the American political development...which he had hoped to use in order to influence France's [own] political development” following their own revolution (“Biography”). Recalling his observations and studies of the political system and society in the United States, Alexis published Democracy in America, an extremely optimistic account of the democracy branded by the American constituency. In Democracy in America, Alexis described and coined concepts that would become inherent to the American creed as well as the ideals of Occupy Wall Street today, such as the concept of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream. During his

Get Access