Not even sure this is the right subreddit for this, but it’s something that’s been on my mind every single time I go back home.

I honestly think Americans who don’t come from immigrant communities, or who are far removed from their family’s immigrant background, genuinely cannot conceptualize how much America’s soft power has collapsed in certain parts of the world. And I don’t mean “soft power” in the geopolitical or diplomatic sense, I mean the image of American life itself.

I come from a country and culture where the American way of life and the “American Dream” were put on an almost vaulted pedestal. Even people who strongly disliked U.S. foreign policy or American intervention abroad still often deeply admired the idea of life in America (the lifestyle, the opportunity, the modernity, the feeling that life there was bigger, freer, more full of possibility). Even if that was an innaccurate understanding, that was the way people believed it would be to live there.

As a kid, literally every kid talked about wanting to live in America one day. If someone made it to America, people genuinely revered them for it. It was “the dream” in a very real sense, and not just in my country either. I saw this same attitude in a lot of places I visited as a young person.

That’s the part I think a lot of Americans without immigrant roots (that they identify with or have connections to still) cannot fully grasp because they never saw how intense that mythology once was.

The shift is so insane from then to now!!

Nobody I come across talks about the U.S. that way anymore. Nobody. Even people living in poverty often talk about America now with a “look what they’ve done to themselves” attitude. There is absolutely no idealized version of American life. The idea of moving there is discussed almost entirely in practical or transactional terms now. “I’d only go for a few years to make money so I can come back.” “I’d rather go to X country instead.” “I hear they slave until they die.”

I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing. But I think a lot of Americans underestimate how much U.S. cultural dominance rested on the rest of the world seeing American life itself as aspirational, even when they disliked the U.S. politically.

A kind in threadbare clothes in the countryside spoke to me about how sorry he was for kids in the US. He heard they were idiots. I was a countryside kid in threadbare clothes once! I could never have imagined this future!