Reevaluating the American Dream: Class Mobility

The American Dream

Paul Fussell's naïve asserationation that the American Dream perpetuates social class mobility as an unlikely concept is both shortsighted and flawed. The comparison was made that social classes of today are akin to caste systems that infamously plagued past societies. His concept of a caste system means is that one's social class is determined almost solely by the social class of their parents. What should be mentioned is that in the modern first world, one has is susceptible to advance or regress into another social class now more than ever. What this doesn't imply is that 2016 is necessarily the year of opportunity, or that recent years were more opportunistic than say thirty or forty years ago.Rather that this day and age in particular is far more volatile in terms of class stability.
The issue that plagues society today is that people believe themselves to be inherently deserving of a grand sort of glorious life. And who could blame them? Is it not part of the

The viewpoint of income being synonymous with class is perpetuated by the uninformed. As one approaches the highest echelons of society, there are two types of money, Old money and new money. Anyone who has read Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby should be aware of the distinction as it's made it out to be a prominent plot point throughout the novel. This would actually support Fussells assertion that there is a caste system in place our society, but only to an extent. Caste systems are defined as "a social structure in which classes are determined by heredity." What a caste would imply is that there exists almost zero chance of being able to advance. The American social class system would render this null in the sense that even new money would eventually age to become old money. But even that information is practically irrelevant as it only pertains to the highest echelons of