I grasp at ideas of personal and external progress - hoping to find some deterministic pattern in history and American zeitgeist. If we throw ourselves into the future, towards some concrete goal, how then can we remain capable of capitalizing or coping with unforeseen change? Conversely, without goals, without integrity, and with the sacrifice of imagined individualism is there anything at all?
Within each imagined community, the totaled sum of our shared histories must be decoded as deterministic for any measurable sense of "progress" to be felt. I believe that with a loss of shared National responsibility (primarily the loss of a shared sense of what the "other is"), the disenfranchisement of large-scale National Institutions and the degradation of entrenched social identities* it is hard for "progress" to be measured, and therefore felt.
The American identity ("the American dream") is not dead, it does however lack congruency with its past iterations - which is essentially the same thing.
*Great from a human rights standpoint, horrible for social cohesion
