Is the American dream ending in a psychotic breakdown?

I read a very entertaining article this week from the UK Telegraph. I’m still not entirely sure how much of the humor was intentional, but it was compelling reading.

The article, written by Janet Daly, an American-born, Berkeley-educated journalist living in London, carried the headline, The American Dream is Ending in a Psychotic Breakdown.

After a tie-in to the recent Charlie Kirk assassination, Daly asks if the American dream ends with an epidemic of insanity, “in which the freedoms and virtues that were intended to guarantee a great modern nation, are turned into murderous parodies of their original intentions?”

Daly suggests the United States was a historic experiment doomed from the start. “Perhaps the whole project was naively idealistic and misconceived,” she writes.

She places the blame on our ethnic diversity, describing our national experiment in pessimistic terms as “the idea that you could create a unified, stable nation state from displaced people who have chosen to leave behind their historic roots and the precious sense of belonging to a place, however terrible and dangerous that place may have been.”

Her article also lampoons the American work ethic, mocking those who “find the complacency and resignation of those who make no attempt to escape the poverty of their origins deeply shocking.” She contrasts our entrepreneurial ethos with 18th-century France, where revolutionaries ousted the monarchy but retained “an identifiable nationality with a sense of their own shared history” (which by implication, must be OK with complacency and resignation too).

Daly then maligns our tradition of free speech, portraying it as a force that has fueled political hatred on social media and, by extension, contributed to civil unrest—including political violence.

I mention all this because, amid arguments that drift somewhere between satire and social critique, Daly suggests a country of immigrants without a shared heritage cannot succeed.

That point hit closer to our home in Southwest Nebraska than she might ever have imagined from her London home.

It has now been four weeks since the federal government announced the takeover of the Work Ethic Camp in McCook by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and the news has sparked a wide range of reactions. Some neighbors worry about heightened security risks. Others are frustrated by the realization that we had no local say in the matter. Many object on humanitarian grounds, and some oppose immigration limits altogether. As is common in public controversies, the arguments become increasingly far-fetched at the political fringes.

One argument I have not heard—even in private conversation—is a concern about the ethnic makeup of the detainees or the visitors they might attract. Not a word. Not a peep.

That silence speaks volumes. In a community built by immigrants from many places, including Eastern Europe, it reflects an attitude rooted not in racial bias but in the enduring American idea that people of diverse backgrounds can work and live alongside one another. Even in a moment of incredible frustration with the intransigence of our own government, the conversation here has not turned against neighbors based on ancestry or appearance.

That restraint matters. It affirms that Daly’s pessimism is not the only story that can be told. Whatever doubts she may raise about America’s grand experiment, we here in McCook continue to show that people of different origins can coexist and form a cohesive community.

Whether that faith is enough to carry us through the challenges ahead remains to be seen. It’s worth noting that for now, we are holding on to the possibility that the dream endures—not as a perfect reality, but as something still within our grasp.