Democracy and Illusion: A Critique on American Dream

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Recommended: Introduction about the development of the american dream

In the Netflix combination of interviews, Requiem of the American Dream by Noam Chomsky was a brilliant look on our Democracy today and had correlations with Democracy and Education by John Dewey. Chomsky discusses his time in the great depression that obviously we aren’t that bad off today but there was still an expectation that things were going to get better unlike the system we have today hope is slim. What I took away from the documentary was different principles on wealth and power. First, as he bases his opinions of our society form Adam Smith and his book “The Wealth of Nations” that our elite run everything and that democracy or the opportunity of the American Dream are really an illusion because they only care about themselves. The part of the documentary that …show more content…

As a result, I think people who realize the error in our democracy and feel like they are not able to do anything to fix our current situation are the citizens who have joined the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns since they both are against the corruption of the elite. For example, the topic discussed called “manufacture consent” talks about how they are controlling peoples beliefs and attitudes through consumers so that the public is busy consuming because the media is always spitting out new gadgets to purchase and commercials of the newest item to distract us from what is really going on within the government. As Chomsky stated, the “responsible are running society by trying to turn them into this perfect system” by spending all of your hard earned money trying to consume the new products. If we go back to the constitution, James Madison stated, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Therefore, the founding fathers didn’t want their to be a struggle of power and wealth keeping the minority trapped they believed in mobility and the American

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