America at a Standstill

What the Decline in Mobility Means for the American Ideology

Bryan Dumont

Jun 03, 2025

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In Chapter 6 of this series, we introduced communitarian individualism as the first cardinal value of the American Ideology—a synthesis of liberty and equality forged in the unique historical conditions of a frontier society, religious pluralism, and a cultural inheritance of voluntary association. This ideological commitment was not merely theoretical—it was embodied in the rhythms and rituals of American life: from barn-raisings and PTAs to Protestant work ethics and local civic conformity. Nowhere was this ethos more visible than in the American relationship to mobility.

America on the Move

Americans did not merely believe in mobility; they lived it. For most of our history, we were a nation on the move—physically, socially, economically. The open road, the new frontier, the promise of reinvention: these were not just motifs in our literature and film but reflections of a social reality. The American landscape has long been shaped by movement—westward expansion, urban migration, suburban sprawl, and the great demographic churn of postwar prosperity.

It also stands as one of the most distinctive—and consistently documented—traits that set Americans apart from other peoples. One of the most consistently observed empirical distinctions between Americans and citizens of other advanced democracies is their extraordinary propensity for geographic mobility. For much of the 20th century, roughly one in five Americans changed residences each year—a rate that far exceeded those in Europe, where annual move rates typically hover between 3% and 5%. Even today, after a notable national decline, Americans remain among the most mobile people in the developed world, averaging around 10 lifetime moves compared to just four in countries like Germany or Italy. This willingness to uproot—to relocate for work, opportunity, climate, or reinvention—is not merely a demographic curiosity; it reflects a deeper cultural orientation toward self-determination and restlessness. As the Pew Research Center and international labor studies have shown, Americans are more likely than Europeans to view relocation as a path to advancement rather than a disruption of communal or familial ties. This baseline assumption—that one’s circumstances can and should be changed by movement—has long distinguished the American ethos from the place-bound loyalties and inherited social stations that shape life elsewhere.

The Story of America is the Story of Mobility

The history of America is, in many ways, a history of movement. From the Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic in search of religious freedom to the restless settlers who pushed ever westward over the Appalachians and into the frontier, mobility has been more than a necessity—it has been a defining cultural ideal. The American character was forged on the trail: in covered wagons, along riverboats, in mining camps and sod houses. Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis” held that the very essence of democracy—its rugged individualism, its egalitarian spirit, its suspicion of inherited authority—was born of the continual encounter with new land and the need to build anew. With each expansion west, Americans weren’t just claiming territory; they were enacting a national myth that saw liberty and opportunity inextricably linked to motion.

That pattern only deepened with technology. The railroad turned mobility into destiny, binding East and West with steel and steam, and giving rise to the great migration of goods, people, and ideas that defined the 19th century. By the mid-20th century, the automobile and the Eisenhower-era Interstate Highway System democratized this impulse, making movement a birthright. Suddenly, Americans could chase opportunity in Houston, vacation in the Rockies, or retire to Arizona—all by personal choice. Popular culture mythologized this freedom. The open road became a secular pilgrimage site: from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which turned Route 66 into the artery of hope for Dust Bowl refugees, to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a countercultural testament to existential freedom, to songs like Chuck Berry’s “Route 66” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” the road symbolized escape, reinvention, and the sheer audacity of the American dream. Hollywood, too, embraced this ethos—James Dean behind the wheel, Bonnie and Clyde on the lam, Thelma and Louise driving into the horizon. Movement was not just what Americans did—it was how they understood who they were.

And these physical displacements were inextricably tied to moral and civic consequences. Mobility, in America, was not atomizing; it was community-building.

The Engine of Communitarian Individualism

American mobility brings communitarian individualism to life. Because the more Americans moved, the more they joined. Every migration prompted the formation of new churches, clubs, fraternal lodges, and civic institutions. From the settlers of New England to the Okies of the Dust Bowl, mobility was always accompanied by the recreation of civil society. In this way, geographic and social mobility served as a generative force within the American Ideology. The right to leave was matched by the responsibility to rebuild. A people defined by movement developed habits of civic cooperation, mutual aid, and moral conformity precisely because they needed them to survive in the absence of state structures.

Mobility, then, was never merely demographic. It was ideological. It allowed liberty and equality to coexist in a dynamic balance: liberty to start anew, and equality as the glue of belonging. It fostered localism without parochialism, individualism without anomie.

The Last Glimmers of a Moving Nation—or the Start of a New Migration?

Post-9/11 Wanderlust and the Vanlife Movement
In the early 2000s, especially after 9/11 and the Great Recession, a new generation rediscovered the road. The rise of the vanlife movement—young Americans living in vans or retrofitted RVs, documenting their travels across national parks and forgotten towns on Instagram—was not just a romantic fad. It echoed older narratives: of self-reliance, reinvention, and the uniquely American belief that fulfillment might still be found somewhere else. It was a frontier impulse rewrapped for the digital age, with hashtags in place of homesteads. Yet as housing costs skyrocketed and remote work became the norm, vanlife also became a symbol of economic precarity—young adults priced out of stable housing, turning mobility into both a lifestyle and a survival strategy.

The Rise and Retreat of “Go West” Tech Optimism
Until recently, Silicon Valley embodied the last major instantiation of the American Dream by migration: brilliant kids from Ohio or India or Idaho packed up and moved west to try their luck building the future. The campuses of Google, Facebook, and Tesla were the new Ellis Islands. This era—spanning roughly 1995 to 2015—reinforced the narrative that the smartest thing an ambitious person could do was move to a hub of opportunity. But that era has cooled. Soaring housing prices, NIMBY zoning laws, and political gridlock have made these cities inhospitable. The great tech exodus to Austin and Miami is itself a symptom of how the promise of upward mobility by relocation is now constrained by policy and cost—opportunity is no longer where it used to be.

Nomadland and the Elegy of Motion
Chloé Zhao’s 2020 film Nomadland—winner of the Best Picture Oscar—offers perhaps the most haunting recent meditation on what mobility has become in modern America. Based on Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book, the film follows older Americans living out of their cars, driving from one seasonal job to the next, not as a form of adventure, but as a post-collapse adaptation. These modern nomads are not celebrated rebels; they are casualties of economic dislocation and broken promises. Yet even in their rootlessness, they embody fragments of communitarian individualism: forming mobile micro-communities, helping one another patch tires and cook meals, and maintaining dignity through voluntary obligation. Nomadland captures the ghost of an American ideal—freedom in movement—now shrouded in economic desperation.

COVID and the Digital Nomad Mirage
The pandemic revived the idea of mobility in form—but not in substance. Remote work allowed millions of Americans to leave cities and relocate to smaller towns or warmer climates. Superficially, this resembled the old ethos: “go where the opportunity is.” But in practice, it often meant the reverse: the privileged taking opportunity with them while hollowing out local civic life in the places they left behind. What we saw wasn’t a democratization of mobility, but a bifurcation. Some moved with flexibility and agency; others were stuck—locked out of education, housing, or reliable work, deepening the divide between the mobile and immobile classes.

Declining Civic Rituals of Movement
Even everyday rites of mobility have faded. Fewer young people leave their hometowns for college. Marriage rates, which once prompted residential moves, are falling. The military draft is gone, and with it, the experience of young Americans from different regions converging and forming bonds in unfamiliar settings. Even the symbolic rituals of movement are vanishing. In past generations, earning a driver’s license was a rite of passage into adulthood—a tangible expression of freedom and possibility. It meant you could leave your hometown, chase a job, visit a friend across state lines, or simply drive toward an unknown horizon. But today, that ritual is fading. In 1983, nearly half of all 16-year-olds in America had a driver’s license; by 2018, that number had fallen to just one in four. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, licensure dropped from 92% to 80% in the same period. The decline of the driver’s license is more than a transportation trend; it is an emblem of a generation less inclined—or less able—to move, and thus less likely to experience the civic and moral formation that such movement once entailed. These civic rites—going away to college, joining the armed forces, chasing work across state lines—once gave Americans a shared sense of national belonging forged in motion. Today, the story is inverted: families live closer than ever, often out of necessity, and entire regions are graying in place. The country is slowly calcifying.

For the first time in modern history, Americans are not moving. Geographic mobility—once the lifeblood of our civic imagination—has declined to record lows. So too has economic mobility. Together, these twin declines pose a grave threat to the ideological balance that once held our nation together.

What Happens When We Stop Moving?

Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck marshals a formidable body of empirical evidence to show that the decline in geographic and economic mobility in the United States is not merely a demographic trend—it is a foundational threat to the health of American society. Drawing on decades of census data, economic analyses, and longitudinal studies, Appelbaum documents how high mobility once correlated strongly with upward economic advancement, civic participation, and cross-regional cultural integration. He highlights that when Americans moved—to new towns, new jobs, new regions—they didn’t just improve their personal fortunes; they reinvigorated communities, diversified local economies, and sustained a fluid meritocratic order. Today, by contrast, Americans are moving less than at any point since World War II, and this stagnation aligns with a measurable decline in social trust, institutional confidence, and intergenerational economic progress. In some regions, immobility now predicts worse outcomes than poverty alone. Appelbaum’s central thesis is urgent and unsettling: when people stop moving, inequality calcifies, opportunity fades, and the democratic habits that once thrived in dynamic, mobile communities begin to wither.

Consider the data. In the 1950s and 60s, nearly one in five Americans changed residences each year. That number now hovers around 9 percent—the lowest in recorded history. And the trend is not simply about aging populations or rising housing costs (though both play a role). It reflects a deeper shift: the erosion of faith in mobility as a vehicle for improvement. Americans are less likely to believe that moving—or striving—will lead to a better life. The American Dream, once predicated on movement, is being replaced by a kind of inert fatalism.

The consequences are cultural as much as economic. As Robert Putnam famously noted, social capital declines when people stop joining. But people also stop joining when they stop moving. When families remain rooted in place not out of attachment but because they cannot afford to leave, civic innovation stalls. Networks ossify. Localism becomes tribalism. Mobility once ensured that American communities were diverse, dynamic, and constantly reinvented. Its absence now breeds resentment, stagnation, and ideological hardening.

We must take this shift seriously. If communitarian individualism depends on the capacity of free individuals to form communities, then the decline in mobility signals a collapse of both freedom and fraternity. What was once a virtuous cycle—move, join, build, belong—risks becoming a vicious spiral: stay, disengage, retreat, resent.

To reclaim the American Ideology, we must reclaim mobility—not just as an economic good but as a civic necessity. That means addressing the barriers that lock people in place: unaffordable housing, occupational licensing, zoning laws, and failing regional economies. But perhaps even more importantly, it means renewing the cultural story we tell about movement itself. Mobility is not rootlessness. It is the American way of forging new roots.

In the end, mobility is not just about opportunity. It is about identity. It is the medium through which the American commitment to liberty and equality is continually refreshed. It is the vehicle through which we move toward the promise of self-made belonging. If we remain stuck—in place, in class, in fear—we risk losing not just the American Dream but the very idea of America.

To move again is not simply to relocate. It is to reinhabit the ideological imagination that made us who we are. It is to restore the balance of freedom and equality, of striving and solidarity, that defines communitarian individualism. And it is to insist, against all odds, that a mobile people can still form a united republic.

We are, after all, Americans. We are meant to move.