Transformed the American Dream from one of individualistic independence, to one of government dependency

The Transformation of the American Dream into the American Nightmare

By Daniel Greenfield
Monday, February 1, 2010

In the movie Moscow on the Hudson (1984) Vladimir Ivanoff, a frustrated jazz musician living in the overregulated and dysfunctional USSR escapes to New York City, only to be initially bewildered and then angered by the chaotic freedom he sees around him. Eventually Ivanoff comes to realize that America is not a utopia, but rather a society in which you are free to be responsible for your own happiness.

The contrast between the film’s vision of a repressive and corrupt Moscow, where there are laws for everything, yet everyone lives outside the law because everything you want requires going outside the system, and its vision of New York City, where there seem to be virtually no laws for anything, but yet everything you could want is available if you can find a way to get it—aptly marks the contrast between the planned and the unplanned society.

That contrast once lay at the heart of the American Dream, of a country where you have the freedom to achieve anything if you strive for it. But while the rhetoric of the American Dream is used just as often by politicians, it has come to mean something else nowadays, namely government subsidized goodies to help you “realizeâ€