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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31377 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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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.

And 80+% of it is on the Blue side, so Reds who think that Blue America is fake America see real America as consistently losing soft power battles. Foreign tourists visiting America come for the Blue cities, Disney World, and the scenery (which is in Red states, but doesn't express Red political values). Foreign media consumers consume Hollywood, prestige TV, (Blue) pop music, (mostly Blue-allied Black) rap/hip-hop, and the subset of country produced by Reds with atypical political views like Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton. Foreigners who learn American history see the White South as villains, losers, or both. Pro-American foreigners (ipse dixit) see the greatest achievements of American capitalism as Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, not Walmart or Cargill. And we generally respect the output of elite American universities much more than the Reds do, partly because the worst DEI BS that your universities put out is optimised for local consumption whereas foreigners are more likely to see the excellent work they are doing in less-politicised areas like physics.

If I try to think of important sources of Red soft power, I would come up with:

  • The infrastructure of American-funded Protestant missionary work in the third world. There are a lot of locally-middle-class evangelicals in English-speaking Africa and, increasingly, South America, whose religion comes from Red America. Immigrants from this group (like Kemi Badenoch) are an important right-wing force in UK politics.
  • Country music. Big, but as I said above, the stuff that penetrates internationally has limited overlap with the stuff that effectively expresses Red values.
  • The NFL. Smaller than Americans think because of the dominance of actual football (the game you play with the feet) in the rest of the world, and more "not explicitly Blue" than "red-coded".
  • Big-ass truck abundance, and blue-collar-coded wealth more generally. Near the bottom of the list because it isn't what foreigners see due to the dominance of Blue media - American wealth is depicted using the skyscrapers of Manhattan, not the large houses and cars of the suburbs. But it is clearly attractive to foreigners from countries with high urban crime. (If you have access to low-crime cities, most people find $100,000 in urban debauchery more fun than a $100,000 pickup).

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