Seva Gunitsky at Persuasion:
To truly feel the force of America’s cultural attraction you have to be born outside of it. The natives see the cracks up close and learn to take the whole thing for granted. Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, none of my friends had to be convinced of America’s appeal. Its jeans-clad, Ray-Ban-wearing, moon-dancing cultural exports were the opposite of propaganda. They were the natural overflow of a society so confident in its own desirability that it never had to make a case for itself.
That dominance is what the Civilization video games once called a “cultural victory.” I’m not talking about soft power, a much-abused concept that, in seeking to be policy-relevant, folded in American political values and U.S. foreign policy as part of its definition. The dominance I’m talking about is not built on government-funded exchanges or diplomatic initiatives, but on the organic triumph of a society’s language, art, music, media, consumer brands and, on a deeper level, its norms and aesthetics.
For decades, this was America’s most formidable and least appreciated strategic asset.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.