"This unshaken "can do" attitude, a belief that anything can be manufactured or changed for the better by industrious effort, is grounded in the American experience of the nation of immigrants - people leaving their past and what was given to them behind, and going to the land of new and never ending opportunities. It does not mater whether these expectations hold anymore, or for that matter, whether they ever held. The point is that they form the core of the American mythology, and capitalism is only a natural extension of that mythology."
Mike Davis agrees w you. See "Prisoners of the American Dream."
But I wonder whether this is true anymore. The resurgence of the reality shows would tend to argue against it. Note how those shows articulate the dream (you can be anything) while enacting a ritual of humiliation and debasement of the working class.
They strike me as a last gasp.
Joanna