Today’s Editors’ Choice

• Hans von Spakovsky: Justice Gorsuch Will Have an Immediate (and Big) Impact
• Peggy Noonan: What’s Become of the American Dream?
• Kathryn Jean Lopez: Let’s Not Look Away

To view all of today’s opinion, click here.

Opinion in Brief

Peggy Noonan: “How did we get the definition [of the American Dream] mixed up? I think part of the answer is: Grandpa. He’d sit on the front stoop in Levittown in the 1950s. A sunny day, the kids are tripping by, there’s a tree in the yard and bikes on the street and a car in the front. He was born in Sicily or Donegal or Dubrovnik, he came here with one change of clothes tied in a cloth and slung on his back, he didn’t even speak English, and now look — his grandkids with the bikes. ‘This is the American dream,’ he says. And the kids, listening, looked around, saw the houses and the car, and thought: He means the American dream is things. By inference, the healthier and more enduring the dream, the bigger the houses get, the more expensive the cars. (They went on to become sociologists and journalists.) But that of course is not what Grandpa meant. He meant: I started with nothing and this place let me and mine rise. The American dream was not only about materialism, but material things could be, and often were, its fruits.”