The burden of the "American Dream" on rural communities

Photo Credit - Chelsea Peng 2025 "The end of the American Dream and why it’s OK"

On March 14, the House Committee on Small Business held a hearing called “Empowering Rural America Through Investment in Innovation.” Subcommittee Chairman Jake Ellzey, a Republican representing Texas's 6th Congressional District (a mix of Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and rural counties like Navarro and Cherokee), told the room that “as the demand for AI accelerates, America’s digital infrastructure is rapidly expanding into rural communities.” He promised that for every data center job created, seven more would follow in the surrounding community.

I have spent this semester writing about technology arriving in rural America. The promise is always the same: innovation, jobs, progress. The pattern is also the same: the benefits flow out, and the costs remain.

Three posts, one pattern

In my first post, I wrote about a $25 billion AI data center planned for Tonopah, Arizona, population a few hundred. Backed by a billionaire venture capitalist and a Trump mega-donor, the project would consume as much electricity as a million homes and drain aquifers that residents depend on for drinking water. The tech consumers served by the facility live in cities. The residents of Tonopah got noise, light pollution, and a fight they lacked the political power to win.

In my second post, I stepped back from tech to look at the framing. I had caught myself thinking that rural investment came at urban expense. That zero-sum instinct turned out to be the wrong lens. The federal government spends $850 billion a year on defense and asked $1.8 billion for the Legal Services Corporation. The scarcity pitting rural against urban is a policy choice, not a fact of nature. Rural and urban working people have lost ground to the same forces and share the same interest in functional public services.

In my third post, I wrote about robotic strawberry harvesters arriving in Salinas Valley. Immigration enforcement had squeezed the farm labor supply. The federal government’s response was to lower guest worker wages, and then automation filled the gap. The robots cost $300,000 each, priced for corporate farms. Small growers and the farmworker communities who built Salinas for generations got nothing.

Each story has different characters and geography. But the structure is identical: federal policy creates or worsens a rural problem, and capital arrives promising solutions. The benefits accrue to investors/urban consumers and the people who already live there absorb the costs.

Photo Credit - Will Robinson 2020 "Is the American dream dead?"

The packaging

This pattern persists because it is wrapped in a story that Americans have been told their whole lives: that progress rewards hard work, that innovation lifts all boats, that the people who struggle simply need to adapt. This is the "American Dream," and I have come to believe it is one of the deepest sources of political paralysis in this country.

I said something like this in class a few weeks ago. I told Professor Pruitt and my fellow students that the American Dream is this country’s “original sin.” She pushed back, fairly, and pointed out that there are things about this country that are more original and more sinful. She’s right. Slavery, land theft, and genocide are the material foundations. But the American Dream is the legitimating story that makes those foundations look earned. It converts structural advantage into personal merit and structural disadvantage into personal failure.

I know this because I lived it. I grew up male, Mormon, white, healthy, and financially comfortable. My family believed fiercely in individual agency. I followed the rules and concluded that people whose lives were less "successful" than mine were in that position because of their own bad choices. It took college and a lot of unlearning to see that my “good choices” were only available because the structure was built for me.

The same logic operates at the community level. When a rural hospital closes after Medicaid cuts, residents blame the hospital, not the lawmakers who voted for the bill. When a farmer in Colorado threatens to mechanize rather than pay overtime, the framing is that labor protections killed the farm, not that the farm’s business model depended on paying workers less than the legal standard in every other industry. The American Dream teaches people to punch down and look away from the hand above them.

What would it look like to say no?

There are signs of resistance. At least 25 data center projects were cancelled across the United States in 2025 after community opposition, four times the number in 2024. Rural school voucher programs have been blocked by rural Republicans who understand that their public schools are the backbone of their communities. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew 10,000 people to Greeley, Colorado, a conservative town in Weld County, on a message of class solidarity across the rural-urban divide.

None of these are sufficient. But they share a feature that the American Dream framework lacks: they start from the premise that rural communities have the right to decide what happens to their land, their labor, and their resources. That premise is incompatible with a system that treats rural space as a site of extraction and rural people as obstacles to progress.

Congressman Ellzey’s hearing (referenced at the beginning of this post) promised rural America seven jobs for every data center. Nobody on the panel asked how many jobs, aquifers, and night skies those same communities would lose. Until that question gets equal time, the American Dream will keep doing what it has always done: blaming the most vulnerable among us for their poverty and lack of resources, while lionizing the most powerful people in this country as they get increasingly wealthy.