Primary Sources

Society

Doubting the Dream

Americans doubt that they live in a land of equal economic opportunity, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. It reports that Americans are nearly twice as likely as they were 20 years ago to describe the country as divided between haves and have-nots. This change is particularly significant, the authors argue, since Americans have traditionally “turned a deaf ear” to narratives of class warfare, seeing individuals— not society—as responsible for their economic fate.

However, the new, bleaker view of the economic landscape is filtered through a partisan prism: 63 percent of Democrats see the country as split between haves and have-nots, compared with 33 percent of Republicans—by far the greatest divide between any of the subgroups studied and considerably larger than the one between upper-income and lower-income Americans (43 percent of respondents in the top third ...