This is like asking do I have the flu or is my car on fire? Maybe and yes.
The various opportunists engaging in MAGA's takeover of the US government are out to loot the palace and steal all the silverware, and being the geniuses they are they've decided to replace the guards with street thugs and turn off all the smoke detectors while they roast weenies in the drawing room. So yeah, there's a chance they might burn the place down.
But our illusions are definitely falling away. Today's expectations are based on the belief that the post-WWII boom of the 1950s was just a healthy economy in a healthy state, instead of the giant anomaly it really was. The boom came about because during the war millions of ordinary people were fully employed and well paid in defense jobs, and they accumulated savings. They had been raised during the Great Depression to be hyper-thrifty, and because of rationing and war production there wasn't a lot to buy anyway. So when industry transitioned back to consumer goods, people had money to spend, and lots of exciting shiny new things to spend it on - televisions, dishwashers, "automatic" everything. Spending created more jobs and higher salaries, and prosperity spiraled up.
By 1960 the spiral was over, and should have ended, but the business world put it on life support by handing out consumer credit like candy. This went on for the next few decades, until being in debt up to your eyeballs became the new normal.
In the actual American Dream people had actual money, not a "credit score". The illusion is that they're the same. But really one is prosperity and the other is getting conned.
