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.…