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John K. Roth, "Saving the American Dream: Meditations for Dark Times" (Wipf and Stock, 2026)
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John Roth
Edu Sci welcome to the New Books Network.
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Marcy Mazzarato
Hello everyone, and welcome to New Books Network. I am your host, Marcy Mazzarato, coming at you from the beautiful Jersey Shore. With me today is John Roth to discuss his latest book, Saving the American Meditations for Dark Times. John, thank you so much for joining me.
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John Roth
Marcy, thank you. I'm on the opposite coast from you. You're on the Jersey Shore. I'm a little bit close to the Pacific Shore out here. So we span the country, which is a good thing to do as we talk about the American Dream.
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Marcy Mazzarato
I totally agree with you on that. So I know that we just talked about a very different topic with your other book that you co edited with Sister Carol. Now with this book, it's very specific. So. So let's start with what inspired you to write this book at this time.
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John Roth
Well, partly my identity as a philosopher and a teacher who for many, many years taught a course that I called Perspectives on the American Dream. I taught that course at Claremont McKenna College and in other places around the world, actually for more than 40 years. So it's an idea that's been on my mind, and it became on my mind again after Donald Trump was elected to the presidency for the second time, because I felt that the country was in trouble then, and it still is today, as we're talking in the latter part of June of 2026. And I wanted to do something, and in my active retirement, one of the things I can still do is to write. And I thought, okay, what can I write about that might be helpful, worthwhile, and provoke some inquiry? And I decided to return to this old friend concept, the American Dream, that I've studied and taught about for so long and use it as a frame for thinking about where we are in the United States today and in particular, where the American Dream is sitting in 2026 as we approach the midterm elections in November.
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Marcy Mazzarato
Now, our listeners are probably familiar, at least vaguely, with the concept of American Dream, but can you explain and go further into what that means in general as a historical concept?
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John Roth
Yes. This was one of the things that Always made it interesting to teach about the American Dream because at least in my lifetime, this idea keeps popping up again and again. It's like the dandelions that come back every spring. And you try to weed them out, but they keep coming back. And we hear this concept, we see it in print. It's part of our culture, actually. So it's with us. And I'll explain a little bit what the various meanings of it have been. But the concept of the American Dream has a history. Literally. It has a history as a concept that began to be used in fairly recent times. It dates back into the early part of the 20th century. And it was popularized, actually, during the Great Depression by an American historian named James Trusslow Adams, who, in 1931, right in the middle of the Great Depression, published a book that became a best seller. He called it the Epic of America. And in that book, he identified the American Dream as he understood it. And he said this was one of the most important things that America had contributed to the welfare and to the culture of the world. He thought the American Dream as a concept was really an important idea. So what is the idea? Well, over time, the American Dream has come to be used in many different ways. Sometimes it's just equated with acquiring wealth and power or achieving some kind of individual success. But Adams and I share this view with him. Had a feeling that the idea of the American Dream was much more profound and important and challenging and aspirational than that. And he and I would trace the American Dream back to the Declaration of Independence and to the Constitution of the United States and to the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, which speaks about liberty and justice for all. The Declaration, of course, has its famous statements about our being created with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The preamble to the Constitution of the United States talks about the general welfare of the country that is being advanced by the ratification of the Constitution and the implementation of it. We have the Bill of Rights within the Constitution. All these things, I think, are at the core of what, at its best, the American Dream means. That is, for me, the concept of the American Dream is a kind of shorthand way of talking about the values and ideals and aspirations that we Americans hold dear when we are at our best. So it's a challenge. It provides, actually, a point of criticism that makes us ask, how well are we doing with respect to the American Dream?
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Marcy Mazzarato
And if you were to bring the American Dream down to an elevator pitch, what would that sound like?
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John Roth
I would use the phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag which most Americans learn when they're children. The phrase that we aspire to have a country that provides liberty and justice for all. That would be my real quick elevator speech about what is the American Dream. It's the aspiration for that liberty and
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Marcy Mazzarato
justice for all and when. And obviously there's a lot of different ways that people interpret the idea of the American dream. Like for example, immigrants, folks who are coming to the United States for a better life to pursue the American dream. What else do you think that includes?
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John Roth
Well, I think that immigration history of our country is a key part of the American dream. You know, so so many, many of us in one way or another trace our passed back to someone who immigrated. There are exceptions to that, important ones of course. We have those who are the sons and daughters of slaves who were brought here against their will and unjustly. And then there are large populations of indigenous people still in the country. So not everyone who is an American today was an immigrant, but lots of us are. My heritage traces back to sometime in the mid part of the 19th century when my forebears came here from Germany and from Scotland and Ireland and European countries of that kind. So people came here because they sensed that, that there were new beginnings that were possible for them. And that's one of the ideas that I link to the American dream in a central kind of way. That one of the hopes that America has provided and that Americans hope we still have are possibilities that there can be changes, that we can have new starts, that we can get to a better place. Americans I think are kind of born and raised to believe that the future is not closed, it's something open now today. I think this is part of the American dream that we have to try to save. Because there are lots of people in the United States here who have today kind of given up on the American dream. They don't even think it's possible anymore. But I want to do what I can to save it and to make it credible.
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Marcy Mazzarato
And you do or you're very purposeful in the fact that you dedicated the book. The book is for you mentioned that you dedicated to your granddaughter. But this is for Gen Z. The book is for Gen Z. So how. So why did you make the decision specifically to talk about saving the American dream for Gen Z? And how is it that you've seen the shifts throughout the generations from the American dream of 1931 when it was first brought into a concept and almost a hundred years later?
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John Roth
Yes, good. I'M glad to respond to that. As I thought about what I wanted to say in this book, I thought a lot about who I am. And I'm an old American by now. I've lived 85 years in this country. So I grew up in a time when no one had ever heard of Donald Trump, for example. And I grew up, I was born at a time when World War II was occurring. My parents decided to have a child in the middle of World War II, a challenging responsibility to take up. So today, as an old American, one of the things I am is I'm a grandfather and I care a lot about my granddaughter and therefore I care a lot about her generation and about the country that she is going to be living in after I'm gone. And I want it to be a good country. I want it to be a country that respects democracy and the rule of law and that pursues justice and that honors the Constitution and is not corrupt and lawless and acting in a way that our leaders are taking us today. Since I wrote the book, you know, we have been in a war with Iran. We are watching the White House desecrated by cage fighting and by the destruction of the East Wing so that a monument, a gilded ballroom, can be built in a time when Americans are hurting and losing confidence in the American dream. So this is the context in which I wrote and I like the comment that the journalist David Brooks made some time ago, but I think it still applies. He said, looking on the situation in which young people, Gen Z are growing up, he said, it's incredibly hard to be young in America right now. And I think he's right about that. And so I wrote this book hoping that maybe I can contribute in that way to lifting the spirits and raising the hopes of people who are in their late teens and in their 20s, maybe in their early 30s especially, who look on the future and it feels pretty precarious and not very open and hopeful to them.
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Marcy Mazzarato
And you start the book with a preamble, we the people. And then you, you go through the US Constitution in a very kind of specific way in terms of how you talk about the American dream. And you really do a great job at, you know, grounding it into that specific space because we talk about the Bill of Rights and the amendments and the Constitution, it gets thrown around all the time. And a lot of folks don't really know what plenty of people do, but plenty of people don't really understand the context in which that they're really talking about. So I think it's Important. As you mentioned, the Preamble starts the inquiry and really starts your book, which reads as quote, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. And you mention this as. That there are no American words that are more beautiful, aspirational, and challenging, and that they anchor these meditations that you wrote. Why do you start there? Why do you say that these are the most beautiful, aspirational and challenging words that probably most US Citizens cannot say off the top of their head?
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John Roth
Right. When I taught the course on the American Dream, we read a variety of things. But one of the things I always had this students just read, not study it as a constitutional lawyer would, but just read it almost as a piece of literature, was the Constitution of the United States. And we would often pause and reflect a bit on the Preamble, the words you just read that start we the people, and that identify some of the key aspirations to serve the general welfare, the common defense of the country and the Constitution and to secure the blessings of liberty. You know, here we come back to that phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, liberty and justice for all sorts of. We would think about this just as a paragraph of aspirations and hopes that the Constitution, then that follows from the Preamble is intended to support and advance and defend. And it always struck me, and I tried to get the students to think about this, that this paragraph was a very special one. It's beautifully crafted, it's compact, it's clear and concise, at least as you read. Requires a lot of hard thinking about what do these words mean and what would it take to implement them. And that's the challenge that we have as Americans when we talk about defending the Constitution. We're trying to do what we can to advance the. The goals and aspirations that are stated in the Preamble. So that was where I wanted to start. And then as I was thinking about how to organize the book and I was looking at the Constitution, I said, the Constitution provides a perfect template for the kind of book I want to write. I mean, it's just organized in a beautiful way. The Constitution of the United States has seven articles, so seven chapters for a book. Just a perfect length. And it has a preamble, it has an introduction. So a book can have an introduction. And then it has this beautiful part which is really an important part of the Constitution, the amendments. So I end the book with an epilogue that is about amendments. And it led me to think about. About the importance that attaches to the fact that the people who wrote the Constitution realized that the Constitution needed to have the capacity to change, to be altered and developed. So they provided for a process. It's a difficult one, but nevertheless, they provided a process that would allow us to update and change and revise and amplify what the Constitution says. And so we have the things like the Bill of Rights and now especially important amendments like the 14th Amendment, about which we're going to get a Supreme Court decision pretty soon, because that's the amendment that gives us birthright citizenship in the United States. It's going to be very interesting, for the sake of the American dream, to see whether the Supreme Court of the United States does what it ought to do, which is to uphold that provision in the 14th Amendment.
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Marcy Mazzarato
Now, one of the things that I think is also important when we think about the constitutional Bill of Rights, is to understand what a democr like a democratic republic is versus a straight democracy. Right. So can you explain a little bit more about what that means in the context? Because again, we. We can look at the things that we pledge since we're little children, but a lot of times we don't. You know, even my students struggle to understand the concept of a republic, which you do talk about in here. So explain why it's important to understand what style of government the United States actually is and how it's threatened.
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John Roth
Yes. I think the place I would start is that the United States is a representative democracy. That is, we hold dear the right to vote. And we get to vote for people who hold political offices, and they hold these offices in a variety of places, local, state, and national. And so when you and I vote and when we exercise the right to vote, and when we hope that the elections in which we vote are fair and free, we are voting for representatives. We are voting for people who we believe will carry out the aspirations in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. That's how I would put it. So it means then that our country is not a pure democracy. We don't vote on every single person or every single act that the government is to execute. We vote for representatives, and we entrust them with the responsibility to govern well. And they govern, as I mentioned before, in various locations, we elect officers to govern. Our little town here in Washington state, which has about 400 people, we vote for our mayor we vote for the school board, we vote for people who are on the town council, but in a state. And the United States is organized into states. That's what we mean by saying it's the United States of America. We vote for state officials and state legislatures and governors and even for judges in states. And then there's the relationship of these states, which is one of being united. And that leads to the federal government that we have, and really to the sense of a republic that we are part of. That is, we the people form the membership in the republic, which is the United States. It's our country, and we participate in it, we are responsible for it, but we also entrust its governance to representatives. And that's why our elections are what we call midterm elections, which are upcoming later in 2026, and then the more national elections every four years where we vote for a president. These are crucial because they affect all of us in the United States, and they are a key part of the responsibility that we as citizens have to participate in those elections and now, especially in this year, to do everything we can to make sure that these elections are fair and free.
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Marcy Mazzarato
And so, I mean, certainly you make it obvious with the title of the book, Saving the American Dream, which means that you believe it's threatened, which it is. And you talk about how saving the American Dream is indispensable for the necessary resistance. And then you talk about how you actually listen to a lot of popular American music when you were writing the book, one of which is Bruce Springsteen, which any New Jersey listener is gonna be very excited to know that with, you know, probably one of, if not his best song, Born to Run, which he does, he says, a Runaway American Dream, which is a very famous song, famous lyric. And you go on to cite numerous other examples, like Jackson Brown's For America. Talk a little bit about how you. You know, there's so much power in music and in popular culture. So talk a little bit about how you felt personally connected to listening to this music as you were writing the book. And how do you think that's reflected society? Because Born to Run is a few decades old, yet it still resonates today.
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John Roth
Well, it's interesting, you mentioned Bruce Springsteen. I had a student in the American Dream class one year. He's a close friend of mine still. And he said, professor Roth, you should listen to Bruce Springsteen. And this was in the early 1980s or so, I think. And I was aware of Bruce Springsteen, but I have to confess, I hadn't listened to his music all that Much. But I followed the suggestion of my student, which I often did, and I became a fan of Bruce Springsteen. I even went to several of his concerts, including a memorable one at the Los Angeles Coliseum, where there were, you know, tens of thousands of people listening to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. It was great. And I had a poster eventually hanging in my office that was the. It was the picture of the COVID I think, of the Springsteen album that was Born in the USA and so I identify with that very much. And as I've studied, I've actually studied this a little bit. Bruce Springsteen, even today, he has a kind of quarrelsome relationship with his country, which I think is fair, a fair place to be, especially these days. On the one hand, this fits me. I would say I love my country, but I am quarreling with it right now, seriously, because it is not going in a good direction, and it's not in a good place. So Born in the USA Yeah, that's who I am. And I began listening to popular music, especially, and became intrigued by how often I could find examples where performers were using this concept in their lyrics. And I have a recent one that I like where it isn't quite used explicitly, but the Avett Brothers, who are a good band out of North Carolina, are good younger brothers of Bruce Springsteen. And they have a lyric that I like a lot because it fits me in some way. So I just read a few lines from them. They have a song, it's called We Americans. It's like, we the people. And it starts, I grew up with reverence for the red, white and blue Spoke of God at liberty Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Learned love of country from my own family. Now, that's a song lyric for them, but that could be a description of me and probably a lot of other people of my generation and me even after that. And then they get to the chorus, and I love it. It goes like this. I am a son of Uncle Sam. You know, Uncle Sam is this kind of emblematic, aging uncle who is supposed to, you know, be kind of holding Americans to account and to responsibility. Because Uncle Sam always points a finger and says, I want you. You know, for one thing, usually it was for military service. So the Abbott brothers sing, I am a son of Uncle Sam. And I struggle to understand the good and evil. And they say, I'm doing the best I can. Well, that's kind of where I am in trying to save the American dream. I think that our country is one right now that is a real mixture of things that are Difficult to understand, challenging, and not always encouraging. But we do have our hopes and aspirations and convictions, and we also have a pretty good track record as an American people of refusing to give up. And that's kind of what I hope I can help to encourage. In the book that I wrote about saving the American Dream, I want Americans not to give up on what is best about us. And what is best about us is not represented by Donald Trump or by Stephen Miller or by others in the Trump 2.0 administration. Those are the postures, the Persona, that we should resist in order to save the American Dream.
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Marcy Mazzarato
When you start diving into the seven articles of the Constitution, you begin with another popular cultural reference, which is Mark Twain's 1885 classic novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Why did you do that?
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John Roth
I got interested in a more recent novel, one that has been widely read that focuses on retelling the story of Huckleberry Finn in a modern way, only telling the story from the perspective of Jim or James, as the author wishes to identify him. And I began one of the chapters in the book with the retelling of the Huckleberry Finn story because Twain and the more recent version of it are really reminding us that our country has been infested by slavery and the legacy of slavery and race throughout its history, from its beginning until now. And so to reflect on that fact, in thinking about the Constitution, it seemed important to me. The Constitution, when it was written actually in its early forms, not only recognized that slavery was part of the new country that was being created, but it legitimated the presence of slavery in the country. So the Constitution's own history, its own life, its own development, has been a kind of struggle and an attempt to try to move beyond that unjust past to a better place. So it took a Civil war for us to begin to get there, and then it took the amendments to the Constitution that came after the Civil war, especially the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which abolished slavery, granted citizenship to the people who had been enslaved, and guaranteed the right to vote without reference to race as a qualification. So we are still in the process of living through and working through the history of slavery in our country, which Mark Twain was writing about in the Huckleberry Finn story and which, you know, more recently, writings continue to reflect on that story as a kind of emblematic one for thinking about the place of slavery in our history and race, in our current and future life as a country.
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Marcy Mazzarato
And in thinking about the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is has been a book that's been challenged many times and banned many times. How important do you think it is not only for that as a piece of literature to continue in schools despite its problematic language in relation to today's times? How important is it to engage with that? And also how important is it to understand the original context of the Constitution, that it was written in a space that actually gave and granted much more power to slave holding states?
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John Roth
Well, I think one of the challenges in saving the American dream is that we have to own and respond to our history. And like all human stories, the history is mixed. It has its high points and its lower points, and it affects the present and the future. As William Faulkner liked to say, the past isn't past, it's not not over. It's still with us, it still affects us. And we surely see that with regard to the history and legacy of slavery and the race thinking that has been part of the country as a result of that. So one approach to it is the approach that Donald Trump has tried to take with the Smithsonian institution in Washington, D.C. which comprises the great museums in our nation's capital that are historical museums that try to tell the past, the history, the story of the country and to help us deal with it. And if Trump and his administration would have its way, they would rewrite history, they would whitewash it, just as they are trying to do with January 6, when the insurrection against the United States took place in the aftermath of a recent presidential election. So we can't be good Americans if we whitewash and rewrite our history. We have to face it. We have to deal with it and take it seriously and amend it. I mean, this is where the amendment idea in the Constitution is so important, because as I thought about that part of the Constitution, I reflected on the notion of amendment. What does it mean to amend? Well, when we amend things or amend our ways, as we sometimes say, we are acknowledging that we haven't gotten everything right, that we can do better, that we ought to do better, and we try to make changes and make progress that rectifies the things that have gone wrong and tries to mend our ways. So that's important. And in that process, in the book, I spend quite a bit of time reflecting on the voices of black Americans, which have been very important to me in my teaching and thinking. If you think about the American dream almost automatically, one of the sources that people will recall and remember is Martin Luther King Jr. S famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. where he said, I have a dream. It's deeply rooted in the American Dream. And then he proceeded to explain what that idea meant to him. And he said, it's time for the country to start living with respect and fidelity to its best selves. And that's what he was calling the country to do. And black voices have been doing that kind of calling with regularity in our history and continue to do it today. And it's important for all of us Americans to listen to those voices and to heed what they say.
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Marcy Mazzarato
You also talk very specifically about certain dimensions, right, of the American Dream and what they emphasize. For example, individualism, economic success, property acquisition, wealth accumulation, which seems to be a very explicit part of the American Dream, particularly now. And then also other things that move beyond that individualistic sense, which is community, shared moral values such as equality and justice for all, democracy and the rule of law, respect for critical inquiry and pluralism that embraces diversity. And furthermore, even a third dimension which emphasizes possibility, opportunity, and particularly those for new beginnings. What, in terms of these dimensions as they are happening right now, what do you think is the most problematic part of that story?
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John Roth
I think maybe the most problematic part of the American Dream is when it gets interpreted as the quest for power and wealth, an idea that I spoke about a little bit at the beginning of our time together here. The American Dream does have a place in it, for sure, for economic security, for prosperity, for the kinds of things that we all talk about when we say we need to be able to put food on the table, we need to be able to have jobs that are meaningful and that pay well and things of that kind. That's all part of the American Dream. But I think where the American Dream goes deeper is that it at its best includes aspirations and ideals about the conditions that can make prosperity possible for the American people, for we the people, not just for the rich, not just for the powerful, but for all Americans. And that's where I would go back to the notion that we seek to expand liberty and justice and equality of opportunity. The rule of law becomes very important in this way because where law is disrespected, corruption enters in. And when corruption enters in, then, you know, equality of opportunity doesn't work. We know that right now there are all sorts of no bid contracts that are being, you know, doled out by the Trump administration. And it's a recipe for corruption and even for shoddy work, as we're seeing when the famous reflecting pool in Washington D.C. that was reworked, I think, on a no bid contract has been turned into a pool of algae that turned it green. Not American Flag blue. So these are the places where we can see examples of how it's important for what you could call the material aspects of the American Dream that have to do with economics and jobs and pay and the hope that one can own a home and that you can afford to buy a car and pay for gas and things like that, where those aspects of the dream actually dovetail with the more idealistic, aspirational parts of the dream, which say, look, we need to have justice in the country. We need to respect the rule of law. We need to have fair and free elections. We need to have responsible leaders who care about the Constitution and the general welfare, as the Constitution's preamble identifies. Then we have the recipe for the prosperity that is of a more material kind. And the two have to work in tandem with one another in order to generate the success that we hope. That's how I think about the multifaceted nature of the dream.
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Marcy Mazzarato
Now, the Supreme Court justices of the United States really hold an enormous amount of power in terms of what that American Dream looks like. Can you talk more about that and how and what is really important for people in general to know, for students, for Gen Z, for boomers, for Gen X, for millennials, to really understand just how much power SCOTUS actually has in destroying or uplifting the American Dream in relation to how each justice reads the Constitution?
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John Roth
Yes, thank you for asking that question. It's a really important one. So I want to go back a little bit historically to begin a response to what you've asked. The Constitution has seven articles. The first three are of special importance because they are the ones that establish the separate branches of the federal government and that, we hope, provide the famous checks and balances that we always talk about with regard to the way our government is formed by the constitution. So Article 1, of course, deals with the legislature, the Congress of the United States. Article two is about the executive branch, the presidency. And it's the third article that establishes the judiciary branch of government. And when the Constitution was put out in the 1780s for consideration to see whether the states would want to ratify it, to establish it as the rule for the United States of America, a group of defenders of the Constitution, including James Madison and John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, wrote a famous series of essays to defend the Constitution. We call them today in their collected form, the Federalist Papers. In one of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton was talking about the judicial branch. And he said, the thing that's interesting about the judicial branch is that you, you have to have A branch of government that finally decides what the law actually is in case there are disputes and people disagree about how to interpret it and how to understand what the law is saying. And Hamilton realized that's a pretty awesome responsibility. But Hamilton argued that the Supreme Court was the weakest branch of the government, and therefore, people didn't need to be afraid of it. And the reason he said it was weak was because, first of all, it didn't have an army or anything, didn't have a police force, and it didn't have the power to create laws. You know, it wasn't like the Senate or the House of Representatives. It was just going to interpret things. It was just going to, you know, decide disputes. You needed to have something like that. And it did have power. I mean, it could say that what the Congress was doing wasn't constitutional, and it could even say that what the president was doing wasn't constitutional either. But Hamilton envisioned this as the weakest of the three branches of government. Now, I don't know if I agree with Hamilton about that, because it has turned out that the Supreme Court has tremendous power, as your question suggested, precisely because it gets to interpret the law and gets to determine what is constitutional and what isn't. Yes, it's true that there's no police force or army that the Supreme Court of the United States can command to, you know, carry out its wishes. But the tradition in our country has been that what the Supreme Court says is the way it must be. And the presumption has been that people obey those rulings. Sometimes the rulings turn out to be controversial, and even they turn out, in retrospect, to have been mistaken and wrong, because sometimes the court has overturned decisions that earlier forms of it made. Right now, we have a court that has a number of justices that Donald Trump nominated and that were confirmed to seats on the court. And how the court rules in relationship to actions that Donald Trump has taken, wants to take, might take, is crucial to whether the American dream will be saved, in my view. We have a good test case of that coming up shortly with the court's decision on whether Donald Trump is correct in advocating and even putting into an executive order the denial of birthright citizenship in our country. We're going to have that decision. We're in the middle of June, as you and I are talking, probably in the next few weeks, and depending on how that comes down. Well, a lot matters in terms of the American future with respect to that decision in particular. So the court, as you point out, has huge power, and like Any human institution, it uses and abuses it, and it makes mistakes, but it can also correct itself. And one of the things that I like to take away from, you know, the reflection on the Supreme Court that's in the book is that a lot in the United States depends on whether we have good judges. And I don't restrict that just to people who are judges on formal courts. I think all Americans, all American citizens have to be good judges. We have to be able to think straight. We have to respect evidence. We have to honor the difference between truth and lies, truth and falsehood, and we have to act with responsibility that we expect good judges to have.
- [48:10]
Marcy Mazzarato
And you mentioned the 14th amendment, because you wrap up the book talking about the amendments, and there's quite a few, but you talk a little bit more about the 14th, the 19th, the 1st and the 2nd. Why did you choose to talk about these specific amendments? And why do you feel like they are the ones that are the most important relation to saving the American dream?
- [48:33]
John Roth
Well, I think the First Amendment kind of is one that I think about a lot today, maybe partly because I'm a writer, because it's the First Amendment that gives us freedom of speech, freedom to express ourselves critically. It's what provides for freedom of the press, which isn't exactly the same thing as writing a book, but it comes pretty close because as an American writing about saving the American dream, and I even thanked my publisher for this right at the beginning, said, you know, what I'm doing depends on the First Amendment, that I can say what I think. I can put it in words, on a page, and a publisher can publish it if they think it's worth publishing. And we can do that freely, without fear of unjust prosecution. But in our country today, I would say that the First Amendment is itself under attack by positions and actions that are being taken by the current administration. And therefore, when we defend the American dream and when we defend the Constitution, one of the things that we're doing is defending freedom of speech and inquiry, freedom of the press. And what goes along with that is the other provisions in that amendment. You know, freedom of religious expression, which is important, and then the freedom to assemble, to gather together, to come together, sometimes to protest, you know, what is happening, and even to resist what is going on in the country. So the First Amendment seemed particularly important to me. I think you mentioned also the amendment that gave women the right to vote. I regard that as a key amendment for the American dream. It was way too late in coming, but thank goodness it's here and What I find so amazing as part of the unfortunate situation that we are in in the country is that there are Americans who are arguing today that women should not have the right to vote. It's an assault on the American dream to say that. It's an assault on the Constitution to say that. Because one of the things about the amendments that makes them so crucial is that when the founders provided for the capacity to amend the Constitution, they made plain that the words in amendments to the Constitution have this very same status as the words that were in the original Constitution. So that amendments to the Constitution are not just sort of tag on items that become sort of optional with regard to the Constitution. No, they are part and parcel of the Constitution. That was one of the brilliant parts of the decision that the writers of the Constitution made when they included the capacity for Amendment. Now the 14th Amendment is a crucial one. It has so many ramifications and provisions attached to it. But as I've mentioned, I think in my view it provides birthright citizenship as a part of our constitutional form of government. And it also ensures that people in the country are treated equally under the law, that they are not subject to actions that are unfair, that are illegal and that undermine their rights as people who are in this country, which can include not only American citizens, but may also extend in some ways to people who are here who have. Have different status than some of us do as citizens.
- [53:28]
Marcy Mazzarato
Now you, as I mentioned in the beginning when we started talking you, the book is very, very thorough. You go through all these articles and these numerous amendments and really do a great job at grounding the idea of the American dream with the Constitution as they are intrinsically tied in together and some folks may not really think about them in those terms. I think you've done great. So as we kind of wrap up what you know, we certainly can't talk about your entire book, which I do hope people will pick up and read and will certainly learn some things. Is there any other key points that you would love to share with our listeners that you think that they should know about your book?
- [54:06]
John Roth
Toward the end of the book, Keeping Gen Z in Mind, the young people that I had in mind when I was writing it, I wanted to try to, you know, say some specific things that I thought were particularly important for the American dream as it, as it could be understood by the Gen Z generation in particular. So I tried to identify some, some priorities, some things that, that I thought deserved special attention kind of on the policy making side of our political life. So let me mention four of these that I listed, I had a fairly long list. I won't try to cover them all, but there are four here that I think maybe, as we draw to a close that are worth pointing out, I think it's very important to make the American Dream credible to save it. It's important for us to build homes in our country. And I mean, by building homes, we actually need to make housing affordable, home owning affordable again for Americans, because owning a home has been kind of a basic element of the American dream that you could own your place to live, you could have a place to live, that you weren't going to be homeless. So building homes is important, but I use the word homes instead of houses because, as the cliche goes, a house is not necessarily a home. And so we need to build homes. We not only have to build more housing and make it affordable for people, but we need to provide the elements in our social order that allow homes to exist. So child care, for example, looms pretty large for me. I'm amazed when I read the amounts of money that people are having to pay for childcare in a situation where families usually require both. They require more than one person to earn a living. You know, so the care for children is very important. So in building homes, I'm talking about, you know, the whole set of factors that go into providing good places in which American people can live and raise a family and care for their children. Second, I think crucial for the American Dream for young people today is to empower education. And I speak about this as a teacher. I spent my life as a teacher, and I'm just appalled when I see what's going on in some colleges and universities where, in effect, censorship is taking place. People are not able to teach about certain topics because it's considered not. Not in line with the goals and aspirations of the Trump administration. I think that has to be resisted. I think we have to empower education. We have to support teachers, we have to support public schools, we have to provide the best education we can. And this is going to have to take place in the context of artificial intelligence. So we have to be savvy about what we're doing, but we need to empower education in order to save the American dream. The third one I would mention is we have to support science. And supporting science is crucial for ensuring health in the United States. And we are in a system right now where we are a less healthy country than we were before Donald Trump took office. And that's because of the attack that has taken place on science. And research activities which so very, very often are oriented toward life, healthy, life saving, health, improving goals. And then the last one I would mention, because this is so crucial, I think, to the. To the aspirations of the American Dream, we need to promote pluralism, what I call pluralism. Pluralism is a term that's used to say, we're supporting variety, we're supporting differences, we're supporting the multitude of talents and identities and languages and ethnicities and qualities that together make our country have beauty and vibrancy and spirit. And one of our mottos, and maybe this is a good place for us to wrap up. Marcy. One of our mottos as Americans is E pluribus unum. Out of many 1. It's the goal behind our nation's name, the United States of America, that out of a multitude of people, institutions, talents, abilities, cultures, musics, literatures, arts, we produce a country that can be beautiful, that can be respected, and can be amended and restored in spite of the attacks against it from within by our current president, to be an America in which the dream is alive and well.
- [60:18]
Marcy Mazzarato
I'm thinking you should run for president, John.
- [60:20]
John Roth
No, we need a younger person, much younger. We need somebody your age to do that. So. Yeah. But anyway, as you can tell, I want the American dream to survive. And the reason I do is because of young people in this country.
- [60:39]
Marcy Mazzarato
Yeah, I agree. I think that, again, you do a great job talking about what the American Dream is, how it's shifted, how it's in danger and how it's worth saving. So thank you, John, so much for joining me today and sharing this book.
- [60:53]
John Roth
I appreciate being with you, Marcy. Your questions are so good and you create a welcome space, and I'm so grateful you invited me into it.
- [61:06]
Marcy Mazzarato
Of course. I thank you so much and thank you to all of the listeners for joining me today. Till next time, everyone.
- [61:13]
Carrington College Announcer
Cheers.
- [61:14]
New Books Network Host
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