The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side. So the half of Euros that buy into the Left side of the flood will of course be getting the message that America is basically Idiocracy, a country of cartoonish bigoted white supremacist cro-magnons. The growing share that is inundated more in the Right side of the slop will see America as the pink-haired jerks who are coming up with all this trans woke covid-lockdowns refugee rights stuff and exporting it here wholesale so we have to suffer it too. Pick either side of the stream and we get the crisp message that America is a sad, twisted, evil dystopia except for some plucky underdogs who barely matter.
derisive attitudes
IME though that feels halfway like an universal white-collar bonding ritual to assimilate and make friends most places in the world and be at home. US migrants elsewhere sure go for it. A surefire topic the cosmopolitan class of any country likes is how dumb and backwards the general populace is, how cringy the local folkways, and how surely other countries have it better.
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The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side. So the half of Euros that buy into the Left side of the flood will of course be getting the message that America is basically Idiocracy, a country of cartoonish bigoted white supremacist cro-magnons. The growing share that is inundated more in the Right side of the slop will see America as the pink-haired jerks who are coming up with all this trans woke covid-lockdowns refugee rights stuff and exporting it here wholesale so we have to suffer it too. Pick either side of the stream and we get the crisp message that America is a sad, twisted, evil dystopia except for some plucky underdogs who barely matter.
IME though that feels halfway like an universal white-collar bonding ritual to assimilate and make friends most places in the world and be at home. US migrants elsewhere sure go for it. A surefire topic the cosmopolitan class of any country likes is how dumb and backwards the general populace is, how cringy the local folkways, and how surely other countries have it better.
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