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Ehh I dunno, the way I remember it any such European admiration for America ended much earlier, with the Iraq War.
I have no first-hand experience of Europe in the 90s, but growing up in America in the 90s, that Europeans looked down on America and Americans for being backwards religious conservative hyper-capitalists without basic human decency like universal healthcare was pretty much cliche in my experience. Obviously this was strongly a function of the environment in which I grew up, but I don't think it was purely a function of that. So, at the very least, Americans admiring Europeans based on the belief that those Europeans have disdain and contempt for America for its American qualities has been around for 30+.
It's intermittent at least since the Reagan administration -- and corresponds to whether the President has a (D) or an (R) after his name.
IDK, I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I was abroad back in the Before times when a D was indeed president and I still got called a bum a lot and heard plenty of "Stupid American™," stories--present company excepted, of course!
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There is still widespread admiration for America across Europe. Almost everyone admires aspects of US culture/politics but not others – you could find different fault lines of debate around freedom, race, globalism, middle eastern wars etc depending on who you're talking to, even if there was a lot of disagreement on where America is superior and where it's not.
But Trump has been a great unifier because the majority of people, even those who might be naturally allied to some of his views and who in the past have said things like 'We need a Trump of our own', have come to the conclusion he is mad. The fact he was voted for a second time served as confirmation that there is something going on in many American minds that we find hard to understand, and to the extent we can't understand it we can't trust it either.
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I remember that was around when the advice for American tourists was to put Canadian flag patches on your backpack, so you wouldn't be hated for being American.
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The Iraq war definitely harmed the relationship, but the Obama administration did a lot to salvage it. Before 2016, and really until about 2020, I met several people who had either been or dreamed of going to the US. It was not uncommon for political parties to associate with American ones. Now, everyone I know caveats their wishes to go with a "I will wait until the situation improves. Any party with a positive view of Trump risks losing voters.
The people opposed to the US have historically been limited to extreme leftists (communists and the like), as well as refugees from the countries America invaded. With the second Trump administration, this opinion is now mainstream. The harm this administration has inflicted upon the American reputation is honestly ridiculous.
No, Obama being elected and having that all-important (D) after his name did a lot to salvage it. Obama bombed the shit out of brown people with the best of them.
It isn't R/D, it is Red/Blue. Reagan and Bush Sr were hated by the hard left, but not by normie Europeans. The main thing my (utterly conventional European establishment-left) mother remembers about Reagan is how great his speech was after Challenger blew up.
The Red Tribe and Europeans have limited direct contact (Reds don't travel internationally as much as Blues, the only Red media that gets exported is sports, Europeans visiting the US on business are visiting blue cities unless they work in the energy industry, and Europeans visiting the US as tourists are visiting blue cities, natural wonders and Disney). So most of what we learn about the Red Tribe is filtered through (hostile) Blue media, and most of what the Red Tribe know about Europeans is based on social media outrage porn and/or negatively polarising against positive depictions of Europe in Blue media.
The one place where non-Americans have direct visibility of how Reds think is the public behaviour of the man they have chosen to represent them on the world stage since 2016. And from the outside a culture that can enthusiastically elect Donald Trump looks like a culture that considers sadism a virtue and honesty a vice.
It's worth noting it goes both ways; Europe's treatment of its native red tribe does not endear it to American reds, who then find offending the EU elites to be totally acceptable if not good.
Europe doesn't have a "native red tribe". (Some groups that fit the description exist, like Northern Irish Protestants in the UK, who are the ancestors of the American red tribe, but they aren't numerous enough to be an important political force in any European country I am familiar with). The red tribe as discussed by e.g. Scott Siskind isn't just "people with right-populist political views" - it is a distinctive culture within America with its own folkways (including religion) that became uniquely welcoming to right-populist politics because of how the civil rights era went down.
The result of this is that you can predict a white American's politics much more effectively based on tribal markers like hobbies or TV-watching habits than based on conventional demographic data like age or income. This is not the case in Europe where right-populism is the politics of the old (in the UK) or the poor and uneducated (almost everywhere else).
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It's min-maxing. Trump's a boor, but since Reagan, Bush Sr., and certainly Bush Jr. were all treated the same way, that's not a loss. If indeed the Red Tribe Europeans see a difference, it doesn't matter because Blue Tribe Europe has been firmly in charge the whole time.
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