Badtux, in his guise as the Sombre Penguin, wrote a poignant obituary for the American Dream and its children, riffing off recent news in Palo Alto, California, where four young folks in the last four months have stepped in front of trains deliberately.

Palo Alto, it seems, is a place where the American Dream has gone to make its last stand, where the desperation of parents to make sure that their own children do not fall out of the comfortable upper-middle-class affluence to which they are accustomed has led to pressures upon children that they are not capable of handling, where every child is instilled with a desperation, a fear, that if they are not the best, if they are not at the top of their class, if they are not popular, if they don’t take all the right extracurriculars or are lousy at sports so do not look good to recruiters from top colleges looking for “well-rounded” students, then they are failures, doomed to be one of those people who shuffle around pushing a shopping cart, a piteous beggar in the cornucopia of America.

Palo Alto. It is a kingdom of fear, in the end, fear of failure, fear of falling out of the upper middle class, fear that this generation will be the last generation of upper middle class America as the American Dream turns into the American Nightmare of Mexico North, a nation of piteous ill-educated peasants and a small upper crust of masters who rule them all, a place where an ill-defined sense of panic clutches each heart in a deadly grip. And a place where children, overwhelmed, step out in front of trains and end it all.

No wonder the penguin is so somber. Makes me shudder just reading his plaintive words.

But I’m thinking that’s not really the American Dream that’s dying out there in Palo Alto and dozens of other suburban enclaves across the country. It’s a hoax, a false dream. The fella who coined that phrase back in 1931, James Truslow Adams in his book “Epic of America,” didn’t see the American dream as what’s it’s become in late the 20th and early 21st centuries — more keenly, perhaps, since the 1980s. To Adams, it wasn’t the accumulation of things and status and privilege. Quite the contrary.

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

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The American Dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.

That sure doesn’t sound much like the American Dream does it? It sounds, well, like socialism. It sounds, well, liberal. Progressive, even.

It sounds right. “A land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” “Unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.”

The American Dream we know — the pretender, the fake — is nothing like that. The American Dream we know, the one touted incessantly by radio and television commentators, tells us that we all have the opportunity to attain this dream, and all we have to do is work hard and we’ll get there. And once we’re there, the government will make sure we never have to suffer again, not for one instant.

That’s just not what Adams said, and since he coined the phrase, I’m gonna have to go with his definition.

Late Tuesday night, this nation lost a man who embodied the American Dream, the real one. It wasn’t because he was born at the bottom of the heap and worked his way to the top — he didn’t. He was born at the top. And it wasn’t because he devoted his life to keeping his status — and that of others either born or made into it — far away from the pleading cries of those who lacked the “opportunity” to reach his soaring heights and those who saw the world a little differently.

Nope. Ted Kennedy, in fact, was one of those who saw the world a little differently.

Nearly seven years ago, Charles Pierce wrote about Kennedy in the Boston Globe. In it, he related a few stories that illustrated the kind of man Kennedy was. The kind of man who made sure John McCain’s son Jimmy, with his father in Massachusetts for a ceremony, celebrated his 11th birthday in grand style despite being a long way from home on a political trip. The kind of man who stood alone in a middle school hallway reading every single message written on “broad swatches” of white paper, hung there by school officials so students could write how they felt after four classmates were killed in a bus accident.

Yes, this was the same Ted Kennedy who fled the scene of the accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969 and failed to report the incident to police. But hear what Bitch Ph.d. says about that.

He seems never to have tried to say anything but that he was entirely at fault there. Yes, he benefitted enormously from the privilege of Who He Was; as Pierce says, if he’d been someone else, he’d have been in jail. But he seems not to have prided himself on that, or to have felt that it was a privilege he deserved but others didn’t. He didn’t turn awareness of his own guilt into the moralizing-others of the evangelical. He wasn’t a hypocrite.

Therein lies the strength of true liberalism, I think. And the defense, if defense is needed, of “liberal elites” as such. The privilege of the elite can and should be the privilege of working to lift others. This used to be what “condescension” meant; now, of course, it means pretending to be polite while subtly asserting one’s own superiority. That’s not what I’m talking about, and I think that genuine liberalism absolutely abhors that kind of patronizing bullshit.

Ted Kennedy believed in the American Dream — the real one. The Kennedys all believed in that Dream. Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Bobby Kennedy, and in those remarks, he quoted the second of his brothers to be assassinated.

“What it really all adds up to is love — not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order and encouragement, and support. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength, and because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving, we could not help but profit from it.” And he continued, “Beneath it all, he [their father] has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off.”

More than a year ago, when he learned about Kennedy’s diagnosis, Terrance Heath at The Republic of T wrote about shaking hands with the senator in 1994 at a hearing on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act — the one that will eventually make it illegal for employers to discriminate against LGBT folks. Heath had only recently come Washington.

I said a while ago that progressives see injustice and ask “Why?”, while conservatives see injustice and ask “Why not?”, if they question it at all. Senator Kennedy falls in to the first category. When I saw him coming down the line shaking hands, I thought to myself that this wealthy, heterosexual, white male certainly didn’t have to care about those of us standing in in line that day, for a hearing on a bill about our equality. He wouldn’t have suffered for not caring. But he did. He eventually came to me, shook my hand, and said a few words of encouragement before moving on.

If there is anyone whose career distills what being a progressive means to me — caring about and standing up for people and issues you don’t have to care about, that your circumstances don’t require you to care about — Ted Kennedy is such a person. His career in the Senate, and his political commitments are proof that one can be elite — born to privilege, wealth, and power — without being elitist. One simply has to care, as Ted Kennedy has and does. He could have spend most or all of his life coasting on the wealth, power, and influence of the Kennedy name. He chose not to do so.

Because they were born at the top, the Kennedys believed they had a responsibility to those who were not, a responsibility to help create that level playing field that is the real American Dream, the one the Founding Fathers dimly perceived through their own 18th century bigotries and prejudices — the one they perceived enough to create a government that could one day realize that Dream.

Instead, we are 30 years into a forceful effort to redefine the American Dream as one that can only be realized under certain conditions and even then only if you pass muster with the people who make up the rules, an attempt to stifle the very freedoms writ large in the Constitution of the United States, a living document designed to breathe life into democracy then and in the future.

Ted Kennedy fought against those efforts for his entire Senate career. And because of his work for liberalism, for progressivism, he was vilified from the right. Even on the day after his death, many conservative commentators could not pause for one moment in deference to his legacy. Instead, they lambasted him, praised his death, hoped for the deaths of other liberals. Or, if they couldn’t quite muster up the gall to do say such vile things, they just didn’t talk about it. They left it for the straight news shows — “Longtime Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died Tuesday night after a battle with a brain tumor. He was 77.”

That, of course, is true as far as it goes. But the vilification? That’s pretty far off base. The Rude Pundit points out that conservatives agreed with the senator “far, far more” than they’d like to think they did. Voting at 18? State government and not federal government controlling school curriculums? Federally funded cancer research? Cheap airfare?

And that, my friends, is what the American Dream is supposed to be — according to Adams, “a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

“Shall be able to attain,” Adams said. Not “have the opportunity to attain.” Big difference. Ted Kennedy, like most progressives, understood that distinction.

And, like most progressives, he understood that the only way that’s gonna happen is if those with the fortuitous circumstances care about those who do not, and care enough to make something happen to change it.

Ted Kennedy’s legacy could fill volumes. His foibles could fill several more. Without him, the Senate — the country — has lost a valiant voice for justice, for the real American Dream. And while most of us may not have the position or the power that Kennedy had, there’s plenty we can do to promote the issues — and they are legion — that he cared about.

And maybe we could start by reimagining the American Dream as it was meant to be — a progressive, liberal dream of a democratic nation.

Or, as Amanda Marcotte put it so simply at Pandagon: Please politicize my death.

I’m almost 32 and I’m in good health, so this might seem a little premature.  But as the President pointed out that even young, healthy people should have living wills, the occasion of Ted Kennedy’s death—and Paul Wellstone’s before it—makes it clear that anyone who is a liberal in the public eye at all should explicitly spell out their wishes about the “politicization” of their deaths, or else the wingnuts will declare that the only proper way to honor your legacy is to start by undermining it.  So, in the event of my passing, I want it to be clear these are my wishes:

1. Please honor me by continuing to fight for the liberal causes I held dear.
2. Explicitly state in any obituaries, memorial services, etc. that what I would have wanted was to keep the fight going
3. Impassioned speeches about the fight ahead for progressivism are especially welcome
4. Indeed, the only way to honor my memory is to double down and fight for a better world
5. Conservatives who don’t like this should shut the fuck up.

I think Ted Kennedy — and John and Bobby — would like that.