The American dream, rooted in the belief that hard work leads to success, is the very soul of the nation, and perhaps the most widely shared expression of what the country represents. In recent decades, however, progress for many has stagnated while income and wealth inequality have surged. The data is irrefutable: With a backsliding labor movement, a growing housing crisis, flatlining wages, uneven wealth distribution, and stalled social mobility, the once-bright promise of the American Dream is fading.
This episode of Common Ground with Jane Whitney explores the far-reaching consequences of these recent trends, examines the values guiding economic policy, uncovers the intricate ties between our political and economic crises, and charts a course toward making the seemingly impossible American Dream attainable for all who aspire to achieve it.
FRAN DRESCHER
When actors last year launched one of the longest labor strikes in Hollywood history, they were led by an unlikely figure: Fran Drescher, the famously flamboyant star of the 90s hit sitcom "The Nanny."
As the president of the 160,000-member Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Drescher led the actors on the picket lines and transformed a bitter contract negotiation into a story of broader class struggle, elevating the strike to the status of a cause célèbre.
“They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment,” Drescher declared of the studios at the peak of the nearly four-month strike. “We stand in solidarity in unprecedented unity. Our union, our sister unions, and the unions around the world, are standing by us.”
Drescher emerged as national labor leader and one of the most powerful figures in Los Angeles by steadfastly holding her ground, even in the face of intense pressure and personal attacks. Her unwavering leadership helped secure SAG-AFTRA’s most lucrative contract in decades, delivering an estimated $1 billion in gains for union members over three years.
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Though better known as a zany sitcom nanny than a union organizer, Drescher has spent decades in Hollywood, not just in television and film, but also as an activist. She has been a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, campaigned against sexual abuse by sharing her own experience as a rape survivor, and turned her battle with uterine cancer into a rallying cry for better women’s healthcare. Since becoming a household name with her iconic role as Fran Fine in "The Nanny" during the 1990s, she has appeared sporadically in television and films, working with prominent directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Rob Reiner. Most recently, she starred in NBC’s sitcom "Indebted," which was canceled after just 12 episodes in 2020.
At the negotiating table and beyond, Drescher distinguishes herself with her idiosyncratic and unapologetic style. A native of Flushing, Queens, who attended beauty school after dropping out of the City University of New York, she proudly embraced her modest roots upon arriving in Hollywood. Casting directors may have urged her to shed her thick nasal Noo Yawk accent, but she made it her trademark—a voice that commands attention in any room and has proven to be an invaluable weapon at Los Angeles bargaining tables.
Oren Cass
Known as “The Nerd Trying to Turn the GOP Populist,” Oren Cass’s official title is the executive director of American Compass, a conservative think tank that promotes a retreat from neoliberal economics and towards a worker-focused agenda.
An effort to “supplant blind faith in free markets with a focus on workers, their families and communities, and the national interest,” the group’s mission has deep roots within the American right, particularly in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, which has seen a rising skepticism towards "free markets" among conservatives.
Cass's political development began at a progressive charter school in central Massachusetts, where, as a member of the student council, he advocated for the elimination of penalties for incomplete homework, arguing that it should be a matter of personal responsibility. His broader worldview crystallized in a Williams College microeconomics class that explored the snafus of the free market.
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After graduating, Cass joined Bain & Company, where he spent a decade working in both the Boston and New Delhi offices while attending Harvard Law School, where he was elected vice president and treasurer of the Law Review. But he became disillusioned with Bain’s focus on short-term profits and shifted his attention towards politics. He interned in 2007 on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and, by 2012, had risen to the role of domestic policy director for the senator's second campaign.
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He established American Compass in 2020 and has built it into a hub for the party's younger, more populist faction, which has been vocal in its criticism of the traditional Republican establishment for its perceived neglect of workers’ interests. Cass’s ideas are at the heart of the GOP's shifting ideological landscape and have gained traction with a growing cohort of younger senators, including Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and J.D. Vance.
In 2015, Cass joined the Manhattan Institute for policy research as a senior fellow, focusing on issues like the social safety net, environmental regulation, trade, immigration, education, and organized labor. His 2018 book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, critiques both globalization and the commoditization of labor, and has received acclaim from a wide range of commentators including David Brooks, Marco Rubio, former Obama advisor Jason Furman, and Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs.
sarah smarsh
A daughter of the rural Kansas plains, Sarah Smarsh is a guide to flyover country, illuminating the harsh realities of growing up poor in one of the world's richest countries. A journalist and nonfiction writer, Smarsh draws on her own hardscrabble tale to illuminate themes of class, race, poverty, and labor.
Coming from a lineage of teenage mothers, Smarsh was determined from an early age to break the cycle of poverty and teen pregnancy that had shaped her family's history. After her parents' divorce, she was shuttled between them and her grandparents, forced to move frequently as they sought work and to attend eight different schools by the time she finished ninth grade. Despite being the product of five generations of poverty, Smarsh defied the odds, avoided teenage pregnancy and won a merit scholarship to the University of Kansas, where she was the first in her family to graduate from college. She then earned a MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and a fellowship at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
In her debut book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, a finalist for the National Book Award, Smarsh writes with poetic insight about the chaos bred by poverty, exposing the ways in which the false promise of the “American Dream” has been used to oppress the poor. Though often compared to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy for its exploration of the white working class and the widening income gap, Heartland serves as a counter-narrative, challenging the fetishization of self-reliance and his conservative "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" mentality.
Smarsh’s latest book, Bone of the Bone, which was released this year, is a collection of essays spanning the past decade, ranging from personal narratives to sharp news commentary. She continues to explore the pressing issues of our time—class divisions, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crises, media bias, and the widening rural-urban divide.
Smarsh has written on politics and public policy for publications including The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and The Nation. Her second book, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (2020), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Smarsh has also been a featured speaker at prestigious venues such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Obama Foundation Summit, the Sydney Opera House, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival, among others.
John Hope Bryant
John Hope Bryant is one of capitalism’s most convincing salesmen.
A best-selling author of books about financial literacy and its ability to lift all boats, he grew up in Compton, CA, and suffered many of the typical traumas of life in the inner city, including the murder of his best friend.
But he had an epiphany as a nine-year-old, when a guest speaker visited his class to talk about financial literacy. He still vividly recalls what the man looked like: He was white, he had a blue suit, a white shirt, a red tie, he was 6’2”. When Bryant asked what the man did, he explained he was a banker who financed entrepreneurs.
Intrigued, Bryant looked up the word "entrepreneur" when he got home and, as he recounted to Bloomberg in 2023, “my whole life changed.” Inspired, he used a $40 investment from his mother to start a candy business and soon was earning $300 a week selling treats to his fellow students. “There's a difference between being broke and being poor,” he says. “Being broke is economic, but being poor is a disabling frame of mind.”
In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Bryant founded Operation HOPE, a nonprofit dedicated to providing financial literacy and economic empowerment to underserved communities. The organization’s mission is to make free enterprise accessible to all and offers free financial counseling and coaching through 300 offices, serving over 1,000 locations - notably, it is the only nonprofit authorized by federal regulators to operate within bank branches, with much of its funding coming from the private sector.
In 2020, the organization partnered with Shopify to equip Black entrepreneurs with the tools to build businesses, aiming to create one million Black businesses by 2030. “Financial freedom might be the only real freedom,” Bryant, now 58, remarked to Time last year. “Every other freedom can be taken away.”
In July 2024, OpenAI awarded its first-ever grant to a community-based organization, providing $500,000 to support the expansion of Operation HOPE's financial coaching and support services. Bryant is now at the forefront of discussions on the ethics of artificial intelligence, serving as co-chairman, along with OpenAI's Sam Altman, of a new Artificial Intelligence Ethics Council, which addresses ethical issues related to AI and its impact on underserved and historically excluded communities.
A philanthropist and a pied piper for the magic of capitalism, Bryant has advised the last three U.S. presidents and is a founding member of the Clinton Global Initiative.