Hi, you're studying for the German Abitur and you'd like to remember the most important points about the USA and the American Dream, then this is the right video for you. Let's jump right in. I divided this video into several sections.
Let me show them to you before I go into detail on each one of them. So we have first the concept of the American Dream. What is it? What do people mean when they say that?
What are some of the backgrounds of this concept? the culture wars, what does that term mean, what ideas does it stand for, and immigration, which of course for a country like the USA is very important, the African-American experience and why that matters, and where Where does the American dream stand today? A topic that is often discussed in the Abitur task, so it's good to know a little bit about it. Let's go. So, the American dream, this is actually a term that somebody really came up with and invented.
James Truslow Adams wrote a book and it's really not one dream, one idea, but it's a set of expectations and beliefs. So ideas that made people want to come to the USA and that for the people there who were living there. and sort of shape what they thought about their own country. And it's not really, again, one idea, but it's a set of different and pretty complex philosophical ideas, religious ideas, etc.
The common references that we will hear in everyday speech when people talk about it are usually things like that America is the land of opportunity and you can get from rags to riches. And if you work hard, you'll make it and you'll be rich, etc. And And what all of these common references focus on is the idea that you as an individual, as a person, can work hard and will make it.
But this is only a small aspect of the bigger idea of the American dream. Many people say that the USA is not a traditional country. And if that's true, if you compare it to, let's say, France, France is a country that grew traditionally and organically.
And the USA is more an idea, people argue. Because it was... was founded by people who came there in order to set up a new and better country.
The foundation are some documents. An important one is, of course, the Declaration of Independence, independence from the British. All men are created equal is one of the important terms or slogans in there, and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The Constitution, of course, it's also important. It starts with a preamble, and you see it up here. It starts with the expression, we the people.
of the United States. So it clearly shows this is a government that is by the people, for the people, of the people. It's not a king who comes there and says this is how I'm going to rule my country but everything depends on the people and they make up this government. This concept of the American dream should lead to prosperity for people so sort of some wealth so not necessarily riches but enough money and resources to live on nicely. nicely there should be freedom for everybody and equal rights there is a constant debate as i said before about is this american dream attainable is it still true does it work and i'll go into more detail and on that at the end of this presentation the american dream as an idea as a concept really consists of different points and i'll show you some of them here and the first idea is progress so that there will be technological progress and things will get better then the idea of manifest destiny this is the sort of religious idea that god has chosen the usa as his country for people to go there and set up a better country the other idea is democracy so that really the only form of government that goes works with the american dream as a democratic government one other idea is the melting pot the idea represented in this cartoon up there that people come together from different backgrounds and they're sort of melted together into one identity.
Also important is the concept of frontiers, so having somewhere to go where the land is apparently uninhabited. Of course people lived there but they just pretended they didn't. This is expressed nicely in this painting up there, Progress it's called, where you can see this sort of big angel moving west and people moving west and setting up railroads. Also has to do with the concept of progress. progress because that's the name of the painting but it also shows the idea of how frontiers are approached and how people move beyond the frontiers to set up civilization and this is of course still true today you could argue where people Of course trying to explore space etc.
The idea of success also is important represented up there by that house So having a nice house with a picket fence having a car having two children and a dog etc And you could argue that all these points that sound pretty positive also go along with negative aspects. And I wrote them down here. So progress, they believe that things get better, could be argued that it's a point of...
of decadence now where things are really not getting better any longer. Manifest destiny could be argued is sort of arrogant. Why is America the chosen country and not any of the other many countries on earth? Democracy has many problems in the USA today which we'll go into more detail later. For the melting point you could say this is not really true.
The races are separated and there's racism. For the frontiers you could say well this is an imperialist idea that I'm going to other people's countries and and claiming it as mine. And the idea of success, of course, could be countered by materialism.
So you're just looking at kind of what materials you have, not at your, let's say, spiritual wellbeing, et cetera. Let's move on to a pretty different aspect to the culture wars. And the photos here represent the people arguing for different positions.
And we have, of course, two important parties, two main parties only. in the USA and these are the Democrats and the Republicans and the existence of these two parties has sort of led to a culture where we have two very different positions that people have but they're not only political people also in their culture so what they they do in their lifestyle sort of also move into these camps and for example it matters whether you are religious or what kind of church you go to all that often has to do with a political position as well. One of these positions is often called progressive and liberal. It means these people support minorities and be it minorities in terms of sexual orientation, be it minorities in terms of race. These people are for immigration.
They are against guns. So think there should be gun laws to restrict access to guns. They are for the environment. They want to fight climate change.
So they need a strong state to do all of these things. and that includes being willing to pay higher taxes as well. Often these people live in cities or bigger towns and often they vote Democrat.
Democrat, the color for this party is blue and the donkey up there is the symbol for this party. Then the other group are the conservatives. You could call them, they are usually against immigration, they are against active support for minorities, so they're not racist as such, but they're saying, well these people just need to work hard and accept that life is not fair always. They don't say you should really actively do something to help these people often. They are often for guns and they say, say there should be access to guns.
They are for business or say that businesses should succeed and not pay many taxes. In general, these people think often that the state should not interfere much with people's lives and only as much as necessary and not more at all. Often they live in rural areas and often, of course, they vote Republican.
I am simplifying here. Of course, matters are much more complicated, but to break it down to these two positions makes it easier and there's a lot of... truth to it. Let's talk a little bit about immigration because it's so important for the USA as a country because the identity of the USA again in contrast to other countries is based on the idea that people came from somewhere to live there and not really many people can claim to have lived in the United States for forever and for many generations.
The idea of the melting pot is connected to that. Now the The immigrants often came from Europe or in the beginning of this time, this period of immigration, they came from Europe. And this has sort of served to sort of establish the country as a more or less European country at first.
To show this in numbers, let's take a look at this graph here. And you can see that from 1820 to 1920, there was pretty much to a large, large extent immigration only from Europe and just from Europe. from some other continents and places.
And this changed after the Second World War, where we have more immigration from the other Americas, so from South America, etc. We have more immigration from Asia, we have more immigration from Africa, so it gets much more diverse. But these people, of course, arrived later. And you can see this dynamic, that this pattern has created today.
And you can see the effect it has on racial groups and how racial groups feel what position they have in society or should have in society. There are, of course, arguments for and against additional immigration that I won't go into detail here for time reasons, but it's good to look them up to remember that if this topic comes up, you can write about it. Many people differentiate rightly between legal and illegal immigration and make a difference between the two of them.
So, that should be something you can integrate in an argumentation as well. Let's talk about the African-American experience. Sadly, of course, we have the history of slavery where slaves were brought from Africa to America to work there.
They were only freed or the civil war only ended this practice of slavery. The civil war was about slavery in fact to a large extent. But after that they weren't simply free of course and everything was fine. We had segregation. So that means people had different schools, different seats on buses, different restrooms, washrooms, etc.
And these laws are called Jim Crow laws and there was lynching. That means people were killed. when people thought they had committed a crime. So white people usually would kill a black person simply because they thought this person had committed a serious crime.
So the person wasn't brought to the police or to a court. There was no lawsuit. It was simply killed.
And we have the Ku Klux Klan who did some of these things. And especially in the South, the situation was bad like that. Then we had the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s.
But this is 100 years later only, where people... protested against lots of these problems and tried to at least have voting rights for black people that there's no formal segregation anymore etc and this movement had lots of successes it didn't of course completely improve the situation of black people overnight but they made some significant advancements and of course Martin Luther King is very important in this context he gave the famous I have a dream speech where he which was was part of the civil rights movement. Then many people say when Obama was elected in 2009 this was a significant step for African Americans because he was of course the first African American president. Today we have the Black Lives Matter campaign which focuses on black people who were killed for minor offenses by police officers and so there's growing awareness around this topic. What can we say then about the American dream today?
What shape is it in? There are of course many many things to say on that. Let me limit it down to a couple of points that you could mention in an essay, in an argumentation, in a comment etc.
The material aspect of the American dream, so the idea that you should have or people can have a house in the suburbs and can have a nice car, can have two children, etc. This is increasingly difficult for many people to get simply because... because house prices have risen a lot in comparison to income over the last, say, 50 years.
And you need very good education to get a good job that will pay a lot, which also wasn't always the case. And then the ideals that the American dream includes, equality, equal chances, and that the USA is an open country where immigrants can go to, this is not really true or hasn't become better the situation of the USA. these ideals.
People are still not completely equal. It depends a lot on how much money they grew up with, what race they are, etc. The USA is not an extremely open country, so there is immigration, of course, but it's not huge. It's not like everybody has a chance to immigrate to the USA. We have the culture wars that I spoke about before, and this idea of the two parties means that people really assign their lives to one or other parties, more or less.
and this partisanship, the idea that your party and your group is very important to you, of course, sort of makes a working, functioning democracy very difficult. So this is under threat as well. Still, however, the American dream is a very important concept. It's more like a reference for people. It's an ideal that people strive towards.
It's not necessarily something that exists in reality, but something that people want to work towards. And this is still important if it's going on. on in people's heads and people consider this idea. We should also not forget that the USA is still an extremely attractive place for many people.
Many people, if they had a choice, would move to America and many countries around the world. And of course, this is because when compared with other countries, the USA is still a very, very well-functioning country. We need to compare two countries in South America.
We need to compare two countries in africa and asia and if we look at that then we can see yes there is a very high standard of living there are high wages there is a lot of justice is still working etc education system works to a large extent nothing is perfect here but of course many things still work very well so we shouldn't easily dismiss the usa and say nothing's working out nicely there we are criticizing the usa on a very high level and we should keep that in mind when we talk about the American Dream. I hope I was able to help you a little bit with studying for your English Abitur about the American Dream or the USA in general. And take a look on my channel. There are a number of videos about the Abitur and about many, many other things as well.
I hope I'll see you back again soon. Goodbye!