Brains, by contrast, together with less quantified but popular traits such as hard work and dedication, are qualities considered worthy of reward. Life is unfair, the common story goes. But instead of working to minimize the effects of unfairness, we will construct an idea about good forms of fairness. We will add a side story about social mobility, which, if anyone was paying attention to the main story, would be quickly revealed as incoherent. Meanwhile, the rewards of one round of success will be allowed to accumulate, passed from parent to child, so that social mobility, like time, becomes a unidirectional vector for the rich but not for the poor—something not even Plato’s guardians imagined possible, since they were supposed to examine the soul of every newborn for metal-merit.

Then, talking fast, we will praise the whole thing as a dream and sell it far and wide in the marketplace of ideas. And the kicker is that everyone will want to believe it. The alternative, after all, would be to acknowledge that the whole game is rigged.

mericanism,” Martin Heidegger wrote, “is something European. It is an as-yet uncomprehended form of the gigantic.” Current readers can be forgiven for thinking there is a typographical error: surely the European thing is anti-Americanism But this remark was written in 1938 and, as was often the case, Heidegger meant something not quite what we are inclined to expect: first, that judging anything technological or “fast” to be American is a naive European tic; second, that the New World inherited an aspiration that is stalled and thwarted in the old. There is a truth lurking in the routine charge of Americanism, already a continental pejorative in the 1930s.

Though we must take care not to be hasty in understanding it, Americanism as a world picture—as a construction of thought, not polity—is a metaphysical reaction to modernity organized in the form of scale. Americanism, if it means anything, signifies that largeness is all. Pace well-meant documentaries or op-eds, this truth cannot be seen from within American self-regard any more than it can be judged from a position of Euro-disdain. The reason is that this truth conceals itself in the form of use, effect, or purpose. “The American interpretation of Americanism by means of pragmatism,” Heidegger goes on, “still lies outside the metaphysical realm. The gigantic has a deeper meaning than blind mania for exaggerating and excelling”; it is a flight into the incalculable.

Contemporary eyes may discern here routine condemnation, perhaps more Gallic than German, of the gigantic food portions, obese bodies, hulking suvs, and vast wastelands of box-store and monster-home common in recent cultural criticism. Americans, making up just 5 percent of the world’s population, consume a quarter of its energy. Thirty percent of Americans over twenty are clinically obese, a dramatic increase from just 14 percent in the 1970s. The associated medical costs of obesity were $75 billion in 2003—almost as much as tobacco. Even sexual attraction seems to be shifting with the growth of double-wide America. In 1985, 55 percent of US adults said they found overweight people less attractive than others; in 2005 only 24 percent said this. Talk about the American gigantic.

We make a mistake if we reduce the gigantic to mere symptoms, however, especially if those symptoms are understood only as expressions of greed. A better statement of the American gigantic is probably the Empire State Building, that total mobilization of technology and labour which opened its doors in 1931—the same year Adams’ Epic of America was published. The skyscraper, with its embodied desire for transcendence through height, is an American invention, a fantasy building of the New World. Such a dream may have obsessed Le Corbusier in France or the Futurists in Italy; it may be, now, a property mostly of East Asia’s surrealistic skylines, but it was born on the streets of Manhattan and Chicago, the boulevards of dreams where Depression-era economics bought exceptional skill for pennies a day.

That was the dream that exercised the imagination of Adams, as well as the architects of the New Deal. Working together, high to low, not only could everyone do better, they could create great things. They could be better—better citizens and people, richer in spirit as well as dollars. If the American dream offers a naturalization of heaven, a mundane counterpart to the transcendent visions of post-mortem bliss, the Empire State Building is, Depression and all, its proper symbol. Not for nothing does Deborah Kerr, in An Affair to Remember (1957), call it “the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York.”

Instead of sustaining that vision, the dream becomes the unofficial ideology of liberal capitalism, whatever its nationality. Initially a work, save, and achieve ethos designed to oppose, and eventually replace, pre-modern hierarchies based on bloodline or social favour, it generates instead a cancerous pathology, a runaway version of itself. The result is a mixed dialectic of the material and ideal: the presumed telos of family, house, and car deployed to underwrite all that abstract rhetoric about freedom and opportunity. So, far from being a healthy codependency, this blithe pairing masks a corrosive truth: the American dream is perhaps the most potent means ever devised to effect what French cultural theorist Paul Virilio calls “endocolonization,” the feeding of a nation’s population on itself. The American dream is a zombie virus, consuming resources and citizens alike in an endless round of renewed desire and positional goods, obscuring the realities of class and race, erasing evidence of difference.

Combined with the political conditions of empire, this otherwise merely depressing narrative becomes a twisted theoretical endgame. A war about oil, fuelled by fear, fed back through country-and-western jingoism and football-game flyovers, sustained by claims about freedom and the American way of life, all suspended in the ether of patriotism—the world has not witnessed this rough beast before.

peaking to New York Times reporter Ron Suskind on the eve of the 2004 US election, a Bush administration aide explained the new postmodern condition to the liberal intellectuals of the eastern seaboard. Such people belong to “what we call the reality-based community,” the aide explained, where people “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” This was a view of things for which he clearly felt some pity. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating our new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

But the American empire is not only postmodern, achieving a degree of unchallenged power undreamed of even by the most extravagant relativist; it is also allegedly liberal. In contrast to previous empires, which were more straightforward in their designs on domination or found quasi-moral justifications thereof, as in the case of Britain assuming the “white man’s burden,” the current example clings to a habitual position of exceptionalism. Postmodern imperialism employs a rhetoric of liberation and human dignity, and remains unwilling to offer clear admissions of aggression. Its violence is real and undeniable but inexplicit, hidden behind claims of national security or distant oppression. It will not acknowledge any moral authority outside of itself, yet appears untroubled by internal contradictions in its own moral position, the recourse to lies and false justifications for exercising power.

This is no mere lack of honesty; it is a fundamental incoherence at the core of liberal empire, and the irony is that only the persistence of the American dream makes the paradox obvious. The dream isn’t merely the latent virus of endocolonization; it is also the sign of enduring contradictions in exercising distant force in the name of freedom. Every massive suv speeding along the interstates sports a yellow or red, white, and blue ribbon—cultural contradictions of late capitalism, moving at a steady seventy miles an hour. The young airborne officers and men who watch in grim silence as President Bush attempts to justify the collapsing invasion of Iraq are doubtless weighing up the finish-the-mission message with their own desires for home and comfort: the actual white picket fences and two-car garages to be seen on armed-service bases from Fort Bragg to Scottsdale. Indeed, this tension is the bitter centre of an earlier Gulf War tale, the 1999 rogue heist film Three Kings, in which Mark Wahlberg and George Clooney spend most of their renegade tour of duty discussing which sports car or big-screen television will grace the house when Iraqi gold is theirs. Why we fight!

American dreams have probably always been as numerous and various as the people dreaming them, and they have always been suspect properties—tales of possibility that keep the engine of the market running at a brisk clip. They were aspirational fictions long before every fashion magazine and makeover show got hold of the concept, using it as a justification for facilitating that most profitable of human emotions, envy. But the core ideas of self-creation, self-respect, and hard work—the essential virtues of the Protestant ideal that shaped America—have been lost in a flurry of spasmodic evangelical counterclaims that render the culture of American aspiration fundamentalist rather than political. Where once religious belief offered guidance in the pursuit of social justice, now social justice is understood as a smokescreen for tolerant forces of evil that must be swept away.

While liberals were busy trying to make equal opportunity a reality, conservatives have massed their power to oppose evolutionary science, stem-cell research, abortion, gay marriage, and universal health care. Both seem to miss the crucial fact that the dream used to carry a hint of utopia without the dangerous ideas of central government and social planning. Rather, big dreams could be made real by a combination of money, invention, and confidence, the sort of collective achievement embodied in the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world from 1931 to 1970 and the product of self-made people, populist politicians, and all that cheap multi-ethnic labour. Now that New York is a controversial property in the American psyche, part Gomorrah and part embattled theme park, it is hard to imagine that conjunction of forces moving the nation in the same way now, let alone creating something so crazily beautiful as the Manhattan skyline.

The dream goes banal in the bland, self-aggrandizing ambition of Donald Trump or Martha Stewart, far more compelling as television spectacles than as entrepreneurs, coming alive when firing people rather than hiring them; or it gets off-loaded into the Bush administration’s base of rock-solid Christian belief combined with tax cuts for the rich, a hybrid of apocalyptic rapture safeguarded by plutocracy, the ones who sustain a high approval rating for a leader whose wider population grants him just 37 percent. The rest of us are left to carve out identities from the usual array of consumer options and exposure to Paris Hilton’s breasts and pet dog. No wonder, perhaps, that the dream can then fester and sicken at the margins, generating new forms of anti-heroic opportunity: violent individualism, self-destructive freedom, the internal disruptions not of terrorism but of total self-belief. High-school massacres. Fertilizer truck bombs. Road rage.