In 1883, American poet Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” during an age of great immigration to the New World, as part of an effort to fund the pedestal for France’s gift to the United States: the Statue of Liberty in New York City. “‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she/With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”
For the millions of Americans voting with their feet in the 2020s, these lines might as well be the slogan of France—or Portugal. An odd thing is happening as America, long a beacon worldwide as the defining destination for people in search of a new hope and a new life, is starting to feel like the “old country” that people quietly plan to leave behind. More than that, to be American is downright uncool.
When George Clooney secured French citizenship last year and confirmed that his family’s main home is now a farm in Provence, it sent a strong message about the standing of the American Dream. Clooney has been unusually blunt about what the move represents: a bet that his children would have a “much better life” in a country where fame matters less, privacy laws are stronger, and childhood can be more ordinary than it would be in Los Angeles.
The great un-American migration
He is hardly alone in looking elsewhere. In 2025, the U.S. experienced definitive negative net migration for the first time since the Great Depression, with an estimated loss of about 150,000 people, according to Brookings calculations reported on by the Wall Street Journal. The analysis found a “millions-strong” American diaspora increasingly choosing to study, telecommute, and retire overseas, drawn by cheaper health care, safer streets, and walkable cities where their U.S. salaries go further. In Portugal, the number of American residents has jumped more than 500% since the pandemic, according to the country’s Agency for Integration, Migration, and Asylum. In Spain and the Netherlands, the Journal reported, the number of Americans has nearly doubled over the past decade, and last year more Americans moved to Germany and Ireland than Germans or Irish moved to the U.S.
As venture capitalist Seth Levine and journalist Elizabeth MacBride argue, an economic model has hollowed out both the middle class and the story that used to make staying feel worthwhile. In Capital Evolution, they contend that “shareholder‑only capitalism doesn’t work,” having carved “unsustainable fissures in our economy and our society” by treating workers and communities as “resources to be extracted from.” CEO pay has surged more than 900% since the late 1970s while average worker pay barely moved, they note, and the odds of someone born poor rising to the top quarter of wealth distribution have fallen from about one in four to roughly one in 20. “By basic measures,” Levine told Fortune in a recent interview, “we’re failing to provide economic mobility,” pointing to an average first‑time homebuyer age of around 40, up from the twenties a few decades ago.
MacBride, meanwhile, told Fortune that she sees the consequences in mood and behavior rather than just statistics. People, she says, no longer feel that “following the rules of the system is going to get them anywhere,” a breakdown reflected in declining life expectancy and what she calls “a suicide crisis among white men.” To her, that loss of faith is as important as any GDP figure: The “middle class” was always partly a narrative—a sense that society is working for you—and that narrative has frayed. “We have to rebuild a narrative middle of the country,” she argues, not as nostalgia but as a new story that fits a more diverse, unequal, and anxious America.
But it goes deeper than that. Along with the decline of this idea of the middle class as a distinct thing that can grow and thrive in America, there is also a risk of America declining as a symbol of global cool. A generation ago, blue jeans, Michael Jordan, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s played a major role in the West winning the Cold War. (There was also a fateful trip to a Western supermarket when Boris Yeltsin realized how wide the gap in quality of living had gotten.) With Gen Zers growing up globally connected by social media, they increasingly find that, basically, cool stuff is overseas.
Be cool, man
Political scientist Seva Gunitsky argues that the U.S. is undergoing a “slow slow erosion” of soft power, as its once-unrivaled cultural dominance gives way to actual competition from Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
This is most evident none other than in Clooney’s wheelhouse: the movies. Hollywood’s share of the global box office has fallen from roughly 92% to about 66% over two decades, while China’s share has nearly tripled. The country has gone a step farther, the Wall Street Journal’s Erich Schwartzel wrote in his 2022 book Red Carpet, unpacking China’s long campaign to learn the secrets of Hollywood before largely locking it out of its local box office. As a result, all of last year’s top 10 films in China were domestic. Sudden reversals of this trend only underscore China’s growing cultural clout, as Disney’s Zootopia 2 became a billion-dollar-plus phenomenon after China decided to show it locally.
On Netflix, foreign-made content is taking up Americans’ screens. One-third of what Americans are streaming now comes from non-English titles; a growing trend as streaming of non-English content among Americans is up 71% since 2019. The trend is even more pronounced in music: English-language tracks’ share of the 10,000 most-streamed songs globally dropped from 67% in 2021 to 55% in 2024, as K‑pop and Latin music have surged.
Gen Z’s tastes capture the shift in miniature. On social media, young Americans are “Chinamaxxing”—adopting Chinese lifestyle habits, from congee and boiled apples to tai chi and slippers at home—after migrating en masse to Chinese platform Xiaohongshu when a U.S. TikTok ban loomed. Influencers trade tips on hot water, qigong-inspired exercises and traditional Chinese remedies, while Chinese state media celebrates the trend as a soft-power win. For decades, China was an economic giant with little cultural cachet in the West; but now it finds itself enjoying a soft-power boost just as the U.S. is losing some global appeal.
Time for learning
Even America’s old role as the world’s classroom is eroding. New international student enrollment at U.S. colleges fell 17% last year, while the number of Americans going the other direction—to degree programs in Europe—has doubled since 2011. In global rankings, the U.S. now has its lowest-ever count of universities in the top 500, and Times Higher Education officials describe the center of gravity in higher education shifting from the U.S. to Asia as a “dramatic and accelerating trend.”
None of this means the U.S. has already become a backwater. It still tops many measures of cultural influence and remains the world’s largest economy. But when Hollywood royalty decamps for Provence, remote workers swap Dallas for Berlin, and Gen Z wellness trends run through Beijing and Seoul instead of Brooklyn and Silver Lake, the pattern is hard to miss. America is starting to look, to its own citizens and to the next generation of cool-hunters, less like the future—and more like the old country you leave to build a different kind of life somewhere else.
Levine and MacBride don’t argue for abandoning capitalism; they argue it is already mutating into what they call “dynamic capitalism,” a messy middle in which neoliberalism has effectively ended but no new equilibrium has yet settled. Their central proposal is an “ownership economy” that spreads equity more widely via employee ownership and broader access to private markets, and reframes capitalism so it “serves people—not the other way around.” In their telling, rebuilding an American middle class and restoring any claim to leadership depends less on slogans about exceptionalism and more on whether ordinary people once again feel as if they have a real stake in the system. If they do, in other words, they might stick around.
