“Our ambition and aspiration should be baseline, and we should aspire and have the ambition and plan to do more … I want Americans and families to not just get by but to be able to get ahead.” United States Vice President Kamala Harris, outlining her plan to build an “opportunity economy” in a recent speech.
As a sociologist who studies how people think and talk about getting ahead in life, I’ve been struck by the tsunami of anti-ambition rhetoric in recent years that seems at odds with Harris’s messaging.
