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 kid 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!
Yeah people who live in the US really underestimate how much heavy lifting the media that the US exports used to do. Most of us in English speaking countries grew up on American media, and most of that media portrayed the average US Joe (tm) as being upper middle class. Sure there were depictions of poor people here and there but it was always implied that they were the outliers that you didn't have to try very hard to be rich.
As a kid, I didn't question the idea that the US was perfect until I watched a show where the parents were discussing saving for their sons college. I think I was like, 7? I was like "Wait, what do you mean they have to pay for college?! What happens if they can't afford or won't pay?" Because at the time, higher education was pretty free in my country (not any more as right-wing politicians gutted that long before I was a teen).
TLDR: One of the biggest US exports is propaganda and I think they underestimated what would happen when the average citizen got exposed to the real US through internet and media getting less utopian
In the 90s, the only popular non-Burger media that you could find in the states was Nintendo videogames and select pop songs from "foreign" artists. Everything else was made in the US of A. US media which portrayed the uglier side of the US was limited to trashy shows like the Jerry Springer Show, which probably would have little interest nor distribution outside the US.
Now, it's completely different. Burgerlanders are regularly exposed to anime and k-pop as cultural media and the lives of non-Burgerlanders through social media. Non-Burgerlanders are exposed to the hellish landscape through US social media. The fragmentation of media means that it's harder for the propaganda apparatus to fool the rest of the world by pushing out one single film or one single song that sells the American Dream^TM^. Everyone wants to be catered to their own niche or subculture, which means the sorry state of domestic life in the US will inevitably seep through, whether it's through a Twitch stream or some indie videogame or a rap song or some obscure forum about beans.
You can also see it in US media itself. Just compare The Simpsons to King of the Hill, two cartoons from the same network that premiered around a decade apart. In the Simpsons, you have one technician who can earn enough money to support a housewife, three kids, and two pets who all live in a two-story house they own. By King of the Hill, it's an average worker and an assistant manager who can earn enough to support a single child and a single pet in a one-story house they own. Literally none of the characters in The Simpsons or KOTH outside of loser characters like Barney are tenants, yet by the time Bob's Burgers premiered a little over a decade after KOTH, the main characters who the audience is supposed to see themselves in are tenants themselves. Within the context of early 90s US pop culture, Patty and Selma's jabs at Homer are supposed to come from a place of jealousy because they live in some apartment with a landlord while Homer owns his own house like all hard-working boomers.
“Homers enemy” was the episode of the Simpsons where they hire frank grimes, a guy who was a caricature of a “tough life orphan bootstraps” person, to work alongside Homer. It basically played on the idea of “what if you just put a normal actual person alongside this cartoon buffoon”
In one scene they invite him to dinner to try and smooth things over. He goes nuts at the comfort of homers life - 2 cars, a gigantic house, etc and how that is completely unobtainable for him and undeserved for Homer
That was in 1997. Already at that point home ownership was extremely difficult if you didn’t have a very well paying job or a family that could “gift” you a down payment and possibly co-sign.
The funny (or maybe not so funny) part is that most of the Gen X people I know who bought houses in that era absolutely had the “my affluent boomer parents helped me get in this house” situation and over the last 25 years have morphed into “no one helped me get where I am, I busted my ass for everything” people.
100% this.
Oh and we did have Jerry Springer and Judge Judy in Oceania unfortunately, but there was always this underlying assumption that 'red necks' were not the norm, and that they were still fairly OK financially, or if they were poor it was because they were reeeeeally flawed in some way.
Also there was this layer of 'it's just TV so it's probably fake'. The internet removed that layer
God reality TV was/is so gross.
wait I thought there were two kids in King of the Hill, Bobby and Luann
Luann is Peggy's niece whose mom is in jail and dad is a deadbeat so they take her in. There's also a number of plotlines about how this stretches the family finances, space, bathrooms, etc. Also plotlines about how Mega-lo-Mart comes in to Arlen and kills small family run businesses. Fucking Chuck Mangione.
Luanne had a job, and she later left the house for her own place. I don't think she actually stuck around that long although my memory is kinda spotty.
I didn't only because I was a pretentious little shit when I was growing up, and then I got a minor in being a pretentious little shit (communications minor w/emphasis in advertising), and because watching sitcoms made me feel fucking crazy all the time. The only thing that ever (ironically enough) felt real to my experience was cartoons, in particular ugly ass shit like Squid-Billies and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. That was the America I grew up in, and I had it pretty good most of the time.
But I saw how it influenced people who lived here, so I couldn't even conceptualize (until college) the influence it had on people with no actually experience with the U.S.
Oh man, I relate to you hating sitcoms hard because hated that stuff with a passion even though they had me fooled as a child about how wealthy Americans were, I still found them annoying and fake as hell. It made me associate US accents with fakeness for good while until I actually started talking to real Americans