“The American dream has become a nightmare.” – Reubin Askew, DNC keynote speaker, 1972

THE BARB was aimed at the Republican Administration, but in a column Jenkin Lloyd Jones said:

“It’s a good line, but not in the context in which Askew used it. At the convention, something really seemed to be happening to an American dream. That dream was the idea, born of Thomas Jefferson, that any man, however humble, should have upward mobility depending upon his own natural ability and exertions.

This was in opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s advocacy of a government by “the rich, well-born, and the able.”

Jefferson suspected that Hamilton’s definition of “able” was tied pretty closely to the rich and well-born. His Idea was the antithesis of class. He wanted citizens unclassified, all sharing a broad commonality of opportunity, with plenty of room, to borrow a European phrase, for the wooden shoe to ascend and the polished boot to descend.

His dream struggled for a long time, but in 1954 the Supreme Court decreed that henceforth no child should be assigned to a specific school based on his race. This idea was nixed by Federal judges, most of them Democrat appointees, regarding cross-town busing. School districts in Michigan were ordered to buy another 295 busses.

The Balkanization of America is proceeding. We’ve got classes all over the place. Colleges are deep into quotas, with or without academic qualifications. So to use Governor Askew’s words, the American dream HAS become a nightmare, a turbulent nightmare.

That column was published July 22, 1972 (in the Wisconsin State Journal I believe). Wouldn’t Jenkin Lloyd Jones be shocked by today’s CRT and Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in so-called education!

P.S. The essence of diversity training is “emphasize the negative, censor the positive, and don’t mess with a third way.” That’s the motto of Hillary Clinton’s “Village” that’s “raising” a whole generation to go to hell.