Saving the American Dream for Gen Z

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We are going to talk today about the

American dream. We are going to talk about how it is in jeopardy and also how it can be saved for Zoomers and future generations.

I just wrote a sub stack on this particular topic and wouldn't you know it, the day that I published my sub stack, the

Heritage Foundation released a compilation of studies and proposals that dovetail very nicely with what

I said, specifically on how Americans are retreating from the family unit.

And this is a crisis. We need to double down on the family. We need to secure the family.

We need to figure out ways to promote the family or else we won't have a country. It's really that simple.

So if you want to read what I'm about to talk to you about, you can go to sub stack. It's called

Regaining the American Dream for Zoomers, what the government can do. Obviously we're going to need a whole lot more than the government, but the government can do a few things.

And I will put the link for that in the info section, but I will also add some personal asides and commentary of my own and observations as I go through this piece.

So I start off by talking about how the American dream for both political parties has been an image, a vision, something that both parties can appeal to, to try to get votes.

And this has been in place since even before World War II. This is going back to the great depression, but the

American dream itself actually harkens back before that. And I find it interesting that it became a popular term during the great depression, because I think that's a period in our country's history when people felt that the sky was falling, all was lost.

People couldn't feed themselves. And unemployment was sky high.

And politicians were able to use this image, this vision, this dream to captivate the

American voter, to promise that they would restore what had been lost, which is actually a conservative instinct to be quite honest with you, whether it was the

Democrats or the Republicans. Now, post -World War II, what we've seen in the political landscape is a few things.

We have seen the Democrats appeal to new deal reruns.

They're going to do the Great Society. They're going to, with every Democrat presidential election, roll out a new plan.

It's gonna be new subsidies, new taxes. It's gonna be new programs that are similar to what the new deal did to bring back the

American dream. Because they locate the problem in greedy corporate interests usually.

Sometimes the free market, it's something within America. And the right has been more apt to try to appeal to a home instinct that within ourselves in America are the keys to our own success.

And we just need to get back to that. The threats are external. We have the

Soviet threat, which has continued into the Islamic threat, the Chinese threat, the

Russian threat. And now for Zoomers, the Jewish or Israel threat. I mean,

I see there's a similarity there. It's like the threats are always out there, right? It's not us, it's not something embedded here.

It's something out there. And during most of the post -war period, it was communism.

It still is actually for a lot of, I would say, Gen X and boomer conservatives. Communism is the threat.

It's preventing us from the American dream. The American dream is this self -sufficient, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, take responsibility, be the king of your own household, have security, live under your own vine and fig tree, rugged individual kind of thing.

And so this has been, I think, the glue that has kept America together, in part at least, because the

Republicans and the Democrats have both appealed to this, and they still both appeal to this, but they just have different ways of approaching how to restore it and how to secure it and how to forward it.

This started changing during Obama's presidency, because during Obama's presidency,

I think we had a critical mass of grievance over disparities between majority culture and minorities, between men and women, between heterosexuals.

Well, I don't know if they ever did the economic disparity on homosexuality and heterosexuality, but they certainly talked a lot about access and privilege and that kind of thing.

And Obama approached this problem by stating that there was an issue with America itself in limiting certain groups from obtaining the

American dream while benefiting other groups. So if you're a white, straight male, you had access, mostly.

He even tipped his hat to some poor whites, but if you were a middle -class white, straight male, you had access.

If you weren't part of that group, you did not have access. And so Obama said things like, and I grabbed a quote from him, for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the

American dream, there were many who didn't make it, those who were ultimately defeated in one way or another by discrimination.

So now discrimination is the force that's keeping us back. So the Democrats, they've been doing this for a while, but they really showed their true colors.

And instead of just economic policies, like we're gonna have pro -union policies and more taxes for the wealthy, and we're gonna make sure that things are regulated.

Instead of just doing that, they also, in addition to that, decided we're going to have to level up minority involvement in privileged activities.

We're gonna have to tip the scales. And so this meant reforming, I mean, sometimes eliminating police departments.

It meant stripping America of its own identity and history and regional histories.

It meant amnesty for dreamers, right? These were all the things that had to happen socially to bring back the

American dream, but they're still appealing to this American dream. And I think it's worth me even just saying a little bit more about that.

I think everyone in America kind of knows what this is, but let me just go on a little tangent. I didn't talk about this in the article, but the

American dream, oftentimes when there's a leftward critique of it, it is framed as a materialistic kind of thing.

To be sure, I think for a lot of people, that is how they look at it. The end is stuff, money, pleasure, vacations, right?

And there's a criticism of it because of that. This is, in the evangelical world, this is like David Platt's radical going after the

American dream. And there is a kernel of truth to this in that, yes, you're going to have prosperity when people are left to pursue their own interests, but there's something behind it.

And I think in a virtuous Christian heavy society, you shouldn't have those excesses.

Those excesses are gonna be there, but the Christian society says, actually the reason we want fathers to have headship in the home, to rule their own castle, to take responsibility, mothers to be the chief executives in the home, children to fulfill their responsibility, to learn and not be delinquents and not be on the street, but to actually be doing things that are productive, to be interacting with their neighbors, to have a level of privacy so that they can pursue their own interests, but at the same time have a public sphere where they can all get together and interact.

I mean, think of like the 1950s post -war baby boom environment.

Right, and you're kind of getting at it to some extent, but obviously, like I said, this predated that.

This goes back into kind of our American identity. Like we think of parental rights as of course, but in Europe they don't think that way.

We think of gun rights as many of us, at least as of course you should have guns.

Of course you should be able to defend yourself. Of course you should be able to go hunting. People in Europe don't think that way, primarily.

There's a lot of things that Americans think about and guard because it's rooted in this, some people call it rugged individualism, but this sense of we're gonna take our own responsibility.

I'm gonna help my neighbor. They're gonna help me. I don't need the government to come in. So the

American dream, I think, actually has a really good foundation. Now, of course the mother can eat the child, which it has, I think, in many ways, in some places and in some examples.

And that means unbridled materialism and a pursuit of wealth for wealth's sake.

And that's not really the purpose. It's more of a, I'm going to have my own family.

That's the goal. They're gonna be healthy. They're gonna be taken care of. I'm gonna be able to do it. I want conditions right for that.

That's a wonderful thing. So tangent over, Trump comes in.

Now, Trump has a very different idea than Obama, but he also wants the American dream. The difference between him and Obama is that he thinks it's actually foreign countries that are preventing us from ascending to full

American dream participation. So we have NATO. NATO's not pulling their weight. They need to foot the bill more.

We got China. They're manipulating our currency. We have Mexico letting criminals in.

We have Venezuela letting drugs in. We have China giving us

COVID -19. These are all foreign things that Trump highlights. And he says, we're gonna deal with this.

And the policies that he brings in are, yes, tax cuts, which is a pretty standard Republican thing, but also tariffs.

That's not, and decreased foreign aid and military intervention and new trade negotiations.

And so he assumes the American dream can be salvaged if we address these foreign issues.

He announced on March 4th, 2025, the American dream is unstoppable and our country is on the verge of a comeback. This was, his whole entire campaign was basically this.

We're gonna restore it. And people knew it was diminished. They knew that they were struggling financially. Now, we're a little over a year into this and people are still struggling financially, although some things are getting better.

And so it remains to be seen whether or not in the short window of time Trump has, if he's able to do enough to convince voters that it's back because there's certainly a strong economic component to the

American dream, but it's more than economic. It is a social reality. And the dream is slipping away for Zoomers.

And that's the important thing. I think this is the struggle that Trump administration has. I saw Trump not long ago talk about how, yeah, property prices are so high, but so many of the boomer generation is invested in property.

If those prices crash, they're gonna be in trouble, even though it'll be good for Zoomers. So what do we do, right? Some part of the population will be upset, an affluent part of the population, if another part of the population secures an advantage.

And so he wants to try to do both. This is a very difficult balance. What we have with Zoomers though, is we have marriage infertility rates drastically falling.

We're at 1 .6 replacement now. That's overall. We have bachelor's degrees that guarantee debt, but not competence, let alone a job.

We have a degree of dependency never seen before in history. 77 % of Gen Z job seekers have brought a parent to an interview.

77%, that's insane. It's according to resume templates. They carry the highest average personal debt of any generation, over $94 ,000.

Now that would be student loans, but in addition to credit cards and high interest loans of that nature.

They report a higher rate of mental conditions than any other generation. They increasingly favor communism.

It's no surprise when you're in that kind of a spot, it's nice to think other people will pay for your stuff. And perhaps some of this is due to less

Christian influence, higher levels of family instability, which afflicts Gen Z. And if Aldous Huxley, who wrote

Brave New World, if he's right, that civilization will crash if we prefer vice over sacrifice, we are driving in the wrong lane of traffic right now.

Things are going very poorly for that generation. If 37 % of Zoomers are not even interested in a romantic relationship at all, we are heading for real trouble demographically.

So we have a crisis on our hands and the question is, what can we do? Now, I think the first thing we need to acknowledge as Christians especially is we need

God. Only God can save our land, right? So we need to pray to him. We need to call out to him. I don't know that there's any hope without him.

We can't just policy our way out of this, although policies help. There is an affliction in the spirit of younger

Americans. I was reflecting on this the other day. My grandfather lived through the

Dust Bowl, lived through the Great Depression. He fought in World War II. He didn't get married until he was 30, living in California.

He was from Mississippi originally. And his story is just so American.

His story is like hardship. I mean, I can't even imagine on the good

Christmases, they might get a piece of fruit or a pair of shoes. They didn't have anything. They were dirt poor and they kept having kids.

He was one of 10. They kept getting married. This is the story of so many of your grandfathers, great -grandfathers and great -great -grandfathers and grandmothers.

The pioneers who had to mail order brides because there wasn't anyone. I mean, this is our story.

And I understand conditions are bad and they're different now in some ways, but we're comparing ourselves,

I think, to boomers often, like the most affluent generation that the world has perhaps ever seen.

And not to previous generations of Americans who had it rough and they cut out a living in the wilderness so that we could be here.

I think it's good to remember that. We need to be inspired by those stories, not just comparing ourselves to those who are older than us, who had jobs with pensions and it worked out better.

Anyway, if a child grows up, let's say deprived of parental examples, religious instruction, and in social honor and shame dynamic, that's not a good thing.

If they're humble enough to learn something can be done, but if they're not, what do you do? Something pushing this demographic collapse will accelerate society.

But I wanna just caution on that. That has never worked. Look at Europe, accelerationism doesn't work.

When you let your society die, it usually just dies. So I would just steer clear of let's vote for Gavin Newsom.

Let's let the Democrats in and we'll wake up. No, I don't think you will actually. I think you'll fall asleep and you'll never get up.

That's the problem. We've gotta fight, we've gotta fight. So here are my proposals, okay?

And these are more general, but I wanted to highlight the things that I saw that I thought were the most important.

So incentivize marriage and family, that's first. And it's first because I think the other issues, the other solutions order themselves around this.

We have to acknowledge the serious social costs that we've incurred by loosening our sexual standards, comprehensive sex education in schools, legalized obscenity, pornography, no fault divorce, abortion, abortifacients, same sex marriage ceremonies, easy welfare assistance for single parent households,

IVF with little restriction. All of these things have sent a message to our young people that we just don't value family.

You have an unlimited array of choices. You get to even choose what gender you wanna be and you can do what you want guided by your selfish impulse.

You don't have a responsibility to God, to society, to anyone. It's a very bad message.

And children are being raised in this kind of an environment without norms.

So parents usually pass down norms, but if they don't, then society can catch it.

If you have voluntary associations and religious instruction, but if you don't have either of those things, you're in severe trouble.

So what can we do to try to help families from a government perspective?

Well, the Trump administration has done a few things. They've made progress because they've targeted Planned Parenthood funding. They've cut off federal funding for sex transitions and minors.

They've increased child tax credits. They banned transgenderism in the military. So they're doing some things, but I don't think this is enough.

We're gonna have to do a lot more. We're gonna have to restrict pornography at the state level for children.

That's already being done. And once we do it for children, the logic goes, if it's bad for children, who else is it bad for?

Adults. We need to increase tax advantages for married couples, including covering homeschool education expenses.

We need to push the needle in the right direction, eliminate sexual perversion, criminalize what we need to at every level we can.

Because we are in a crisis now. We need to end predatory lendering.

That's the second thing. Zoomers are weighed down by consumer and college debt in ways that I think it's harder for older generations to imagine.

Zoomers are the most likely to regret using buy now, pay later apps. 64 % of them have used and are increasingly relying on them.

84 % of Zoomers use credit cards. One study found that Zoomers had balances over $500 higher than their millennial counterparts at the same age.

And 10 % more Gen Z consumers were 60 or more days past due than millennials a decade earlier on their payments.

If you look at our American history in the colonial era, most of the local restrictions were at 6 % for loans, maybe 8 % tops.

Today, most credit cards include APRs over 20 to 23%.

Payday loans can exceed 500%. And some states do have limits on this. But we've tried to limit, and I am more for states limiting this, but there have been attempts to limit this on the national level to 36%, but they failed.

You have college loans. In addition to this, Zoomers are on track to be the most educated generation in history, though younger

Zoomers are starting to figure out this isn't a good deal. But that means they're getting loans for bachelor's degrees that probably won't give them a leg up in many of the job markets out there.

And they've been given an expectation that college is going to help them get ahead, and it won't in many cases.

We talk a lot today in our civil discourse about, well, we did a few years ago about slavery, right, in American history.

Proverbs 22 says the borrower is the slave to the lender. And if that's true, we have a generation of slaves.

It's just true. That's not a good thing. And Adam Smith actually wrote about limiting usury, anti -usury laws, as being a good thing because, look, the sober people won't take advantage of those, it's the risky people, and then they get themselves in binds.

And who's gonna bail them out, right? Someone else in society. So as the percentage of prodigals and projectors, the people he identified, but people who are irresponsible or risky, take high -risk loans, the social risks attached to that, dependency, strained relationships, even suicide increase.

It's interesting if you go into the history of this in the 19th century, it's really Enlightenment rationalism. It's guys like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who said, you know, these anti -usury laws, we gotta get rid of those.

Men should be able to pursue their own interests. If they wanna take a high -rate loan, that's up to them. Well, look at where that's gotten us.

No good place. Now, the third thing is civil service programs. We need civil service programs,

I think, and there's a way to actually kill a few birds with one stone if we do this. There are places where you have

FFA, 4 -H, American Heritage Girls, Trail Life, Gun Clubs, but those are diminishing in some respects.

Now, I know some of those organizations are growing, but overall, the voluntary association landscape is diminishing.

And that's not good because that's what usually catches those who don't have stable families. They can find a leader in one of those organizations.

We're gonna need something more aggressive. And I think a civil service program could do that if it's obligatory.

I would like to see this run through the states. It could be a one or two -year program. I said one year in the article, but you would eliminate 12th grade.

So where are you gonna get the resources? Well, we could take some resources from the resources already present for 12th grade.

We can compact high school. I mean, people used to start their lives earlier. High school doesn't even get you much now.

I mean, it's college four -year degree is equivalent to what a diploma used to be in terms of respect and social capital.

Why don't we just get rid of the 12th grade? Mandatory civil service where you're gonna learn a marketable skill, and you won't have the personal debt.

You can get into a job afterward. That would be good. We have shortages in a number of fields. Just speaking for, mostly men go into these fields, but plumbing, electricity, electric work, and construction, there's shortages in all of those arenas.

So we can do that. And we can put people into a situation where it's going to be somewhat intense, high performance, high productivity, no cell phones, high standards, create a situation for men and women to get together in a controlled environment.

High school is not doing it right now. So we need to brainstorm what are better ways to do this to force it.

It's gonna have to be forced in some way because it's just not happening on so many levels. You could get a deferment if you join the military or if you have a health issue or something, but otherwise, everyone needs to go through this for a year.

A lot of countries have this for the military. I'm not saying military, but I'm just saying learn a marketable skill somehow.

Mike Rowe would probably be a good person to pick their brain. Now there's other issues that could be discussed here.

There's conversations right now about the impact of immigration on housing costs, limiting large investors from purchasing single family homes, the competitive advantage

H -1Bs have enjoyed, the way some immigrants use SBA 7A loans for gas stations and convenience stores, and how college endowments could be leveraged.

So I don't wanna highlight all of those, but there are other things that we could talk about. And even beyond that,

I'm sure there's more that we could discuss. But we don't have the luxury of waiting for the perfect policy.

We have to get this figured out. The rod is within, even if we close the border. We're gonna rot out.

And I am moved with compassion for this generation coming up. There's a lot of instability, a lot of father and mother hunger.

Whether the government does anything or not, we are going to have to pitch in. We're gonna have to get involved in our local communities.

And if we don't, America will continue to exist, but only in pockets where her dream is still alive.

And we want it to be as broad as possible. So my hope and prayer is that we can get back to the

American dream before it is too late. But we have work before us.

We really do. So that's my two cents on Gen Z and the

American dream. I hope that maybe stirred some of you, especially if you're thinking of running for local or state office, to think of ways that you can address this issue.

I think the bottom line here is that if people don't pursue self -government, and if parents haven't raised children so that their choices are being limited, because that's how children are raised, right?

There's coercion by the parents, and that's ideally where it should be. But if that doesn't happen, then someone else has to come in and somehow spur people to take responsibility, or else you get a criminal environment and the government steps in anyway.

So we're not quite there. In some cities we might be, but we're not quite there overall. And we need to try to prevent that from happening.

God's in control. We're still here, but we need to get busy. We need to think and pray and say,

Lord, where is it that you would have me serve? My country, my fellow man, my neighbor, my church.