My suspicion is that for a lot of people that grew up in and only know the US, there's a sense of impending doom if "American hegemony" ever were to be replaced by something else.
But since there's no real practical experience of how that would actually feel (or rather, how a very high quality of life and subjective happiness are possible without an US salary in many other countries), they instead project from something that does exist in the US: Downward social mobility. (And given how US society treats its less fortunate in many instances, that seems scary to me too.)
But since there's no real practical experience of how that would actually feel (or rather, how a very high quality of life and subjective happiness are possible without an US salary in many other countries), they instead project from something that does exist in the US: Downward social mobility. (And given how US society treats its less fortunate in many instances, that seems scary to me too.)