Here's the whole story in a nutshell.

WW2. Government imposes strict wage and price controls and pushes unions. Capital falls in line because they are makign money hand over fist.

Post WW2 the USA keeps a lot of FDR's New Deal policies in place and everyone is doing great. In 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of the average home was $11,000.00. Unions are strong and college is cheap.

1964. LBJ decides that the low level fighting in Vietnam has gone on too long. He decides to go for a massive push to knock out the Commies. Turns into a quagmire and he realizes he's screwed. He didn't want to raise taxes, so he prints money instead. By 1968 people are starting to notice.

1968, Nixon becomes President. Says he wants peace, but increases the War spending using LBJ's print money plan. Inflation is now a thing.

1970s Oil Embargo really devastates the economy. Prices skyrocket and inflation is getting worse.

1980. Reagan elected. Giant tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts for the poor. Homelessness is now a thing.

Before Reagan is elected, Middle Class is defined as one income supporting a family of four. $1 million is a vast fortune.

By the time Bush Sr. leaves office, 'middle class' is two incomes, and $1 million is what a rich guy pays for a party.

Glorifying "the grind" is a toxic coping mechanism for dealing with the fact that our grandparents' generation got what they were promised and pulled up the ladder behind them, leaving the rest of us behind in debt and on fire. People glorify working themselves to death because they cannot bring themselves to accept things like it should not be this way and does not have to be, or you are just as much a victim of the 1% as whoever it is you've been taught to look down upon. It's taking advantage of the psychological need for self-assurance and a vague sense of superiority, but ultimately it's propaganda to keep the poor in line.

No matter how hard you "grind," if you are not self-employed you are always making orders of magnitude more money for someone else than you are for yourself. If you are self-employed, it's still true, but to a lesser degree.

The American dream is essentially trying to tell people that the United States is a meritocratic society. The more work you put in the more you get out. However, I’m sure most of us know this isn’t true. Where you were born and what family you were born into is the primary factor in determining someone’s success. So you grow up hearing stories of “hard working” billionaires and think “I can make it there if I work hard” while ignoring your family who worked their asses off and got nowhere. You see more of the lie of meritocracy as you age. People around you work hard and fail, you might succeed with less effort or fail with more. The idiotic decisions of today’s billionaires solidifies the notion that the American dream never existed and was fabricated to get people to work more for less in the hopes that one day they will make it. In reality, it all comes down to the zip code you were born in.

I get the impression that it's always had enough different definitions that it's basically been a meaningless term.

The American dream has always been a fiction for huge segments of the population.

What we're talking about, technically, is the idea of meritocracy. If you work hard and smart, you should thrive. If you are dumb and lazy, you should flounder.

But that is not at all the case in the United States.

We have smart people working 2 or 3 jobs only to barely stay afloat, and we have morons sitting on mountains of money.

Briefly in our history we had a strong middle class. The Greatest Generation built it, wrestling wealth away from the top 1% with strong unions. Then they handed it over to the Boomers, who pissed it all away, and destroyed the power of organized labor.

Boomers inherited a nice system, but refused to fight to expand it. The 5-day work week, for example, was supposed to be just a stepping stone. The people who originally fought to get it would have never believed we hadn't gotten that number any lower 80 years later.

Boomers allowed the minimum wage to stagnate. They allowed pensions to go extinct. They voted time and again against universal healthcare. They did nothing to stop predatory lending. They did nothing to stop the explosion of tuition prices. They did nothing to make social security viable for future generations.

The stupidity, gullibility, self-entitlement, laziness, greed, hypocrisy, and frankly psychopathic governance of the Boomers has essentially wiped out all the progress that came before them.

They are retaining a death grip on their power, and have used it to give us a choice between a Trump cult, and Democratic party that is virtually indistinguishable from 1980s Republicans.

Oh, and when they found out that they were killing the planet, they just stepped on the gas and killed it faster.

So, yeah, the American Dream, if it ever really existed, is absolutely dead right now.

When the boomers are all gone, the voting power of millennials and gen z might have been able to fix things ... But honestly, we're riding the razor's edge with fascism right now, so it's a coin flip whether or not we'll even have a democracy with which to repair things.

"We don’t see any American dream; we’ve experienced only the American nightmare."

--Malcolm X, 1964

So no, it's not the American Dream that changed recently but your perception. The American Dream has been a fairy tale to keep the masses in line with some vague promise of success if they only work hard enough for a very long time if not forever.

We’re in a second Gilded Age. Things will not change until the mega corps are broken apart again and taxes go up on the mega rich.

The Hollywood strikes are a good example — they’re fighting over residuals (scraps), but they should be fighting over a handful of companies owning the production studio + the programming + the streaming channel + the cable channel + the broadcast channel + the internet service + the set top box. It’s basically the pre-1940s studio system all over again. All of these outlets should be separate to introduce competition, and allow people to shop their work to multiple vendors.

It was stolen by the boomers, Reaganomics, citizens united and all the other policies that turned this country into corporate socialism.

The American dream has been slipping out of reach gradually since the 80s, but people just keep hoping real hard about it; poll done about a year ago shows that close to half of Americans think they'll be billionaires one day.

Edit: The poll more accurately says nearly half of Americans think it's possible they'll be billionaires. Which is, for all practical purposes, no less wrong.

To live the American dream, move to Scandinavia.

capitalism happened.

Employers discovered they could pay you less if they kept dangling the Dream in front of you, and yet you'd work twice as hard. Profits ahoy!

These videos cover this question in depth.

Is The US Really A Meritocracy?

The Myth Of Upward Mobility

The american dream was for the boomers who were promised pensions and social securitybin an era where the dollar had some semblance of value. We will never ever have those things. Even the boomers who get 800$ in SS are eaten alive with rent and forced into starving or living out of their cars in today's economy.

The american dream is called that because, you have to be asleep to believe it. We are much more awake as a society to the systems reality. Most of us are wagies that only exist in the eyes of the govt and corpos to pay taxes and generate profit until we get too old then put to pasture. The average life expectancy is 75, most of the boomers who retired at 65 maybe had 10-15 'golden years' they couldn't enjoy cause they were too old

You don't need the american dream. You don't need to work your whole life to pay off a 500,000$ mortgage on some shitty suburbanite hellhole with a terrible hoa. You don't need to go the common path most people do. I feel pity for anyone who got tricked into being an indentured slave to the banks/economy because they were a thoughtless monkey in their 20s who signed the dotted line on 50k in debt for a worthless degree and another 300k debt on a house because "family/kids". The only way to really be happy is to gibe the finger to the normal path and do something alternative.

Work hard, learn to save/invest in actual assets, don't squirrel away your money in a bank account forever since inflation will eat away its value if you just have it sit there. Have an e-fund of 3k to 6k, buy a van and convert it into a semi-living/camping space. Develop hobbies with actual skills, start your own small concession business. Don't buy a house buy land and develop the skills to build one yourself while living in a canvas tent. Plainly put, most people are too stupid, lazy, and unwilling to go without modern convinence. It takes a surprisingly little amount of money to live a comfortable lifestyle if you are intelligent, creative, driven, adaptive, and open to new experiences even if the outcome may be uncertain.

That's just Instagram. The american dream, which is to be a company man and work the same job til youre 65 and live in a house with a nice yard and 2 cars and all that is still around, it's just out of reach for most people whereas it wasn't a generation or two ago.