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Notes -
In this respect, my wife has similar feelings. She now agrees with me that America is in decline and she, too, would love to live elsewhere. (ETA: I'm not necessarily so sanguine on the living elsewhere bit.) However, she has never been out of the country and has yet to experience actual culture shock, let alone any sort of negativity or hostility directed at her for being American.
And in this respect, we differ. My wife is informed by her reading of NPR, which she does daily, and her political podcasts of similar vein.
And this is precisely the part where long experience has taught me not to engage.
I think everyone's realizing this. Left, right, and center. The debate is over who's causing it and what we should do about it. On that note I think there are things that most parts of the political spectrum have a good point about, because they notice elements of the decline that others don't, or don't want to notice.
I think the left is broadly correct about social mobility being down, and the benefits of productivity being increasingly centralized, and normal people losing economic power and agency, and the right is broadly correct about social cohesion being down, and people being unwilling to contribute to the common good, and people being more motivated by personal expression and self-actualization than participation in society. (And centrists for their part are right about social mood being elevated, and political anger being out of control, and political intensity causing mental distress.) The issue is these things are all connected.
But I do think the root cause is that productivity increases have declined in the past 10-15 years, so there's less pie to distribute, meaning that there's a drive to centralize and cut down on waste rather than spread treasure, which is why store closures and layoffs have accelerated. The economic incentive is to extract more value from each individual customer or employee while providing less real value in return. It was easy for America to feel great and happy and joyous in the midst of economic good times during the baby boom or the 80s/90s deregulation capitalism fun fest, but now that lean times are here, the knives are coming out.
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