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Notes -
I was rather surprised to see how outright hostile the sentiment was towards Americans, while attending a reasonably high profile comedy show in Edinburgh tonight. Even directed at the poor sods who responded when the MC/individual comedians asked if there were Americans in the crowd. Apparently "I didn't vote for him" is no defense.
I ran into a very nice gentleman from Washington state while sheltering from the rain under the alcove of his building, next to the venue. I told him that while the show was nice enough, he's better off pretending to be Canadian. He was a tad bit strange, since, as he explained and then demonstrated, he'd stepped out to get soaked in the rain in lieu of a shower. That is probably whimsy and not pathology, but I opted to stay dry.
To be fair, I was sampling from the most vocally leftist/progressive strata of Scottish society. The average Scot seems to be much less deranged, and outright welcoming of the odd American tourist. Anyone else notice such obvious hostility in other countries?
I’ve said this before, but I think there is something uniquely fake and soulless about contemporary American culture that makes many people from other places feel an aversion to America and Americans, even compared to people who are culturally and linguistically much further away.
It is difficult to describe without sounding unfair, but as an outsider you can sense it, it's like you can smell out a visiting American from across the street. Nothing feels entirely real. Not people’s identities, not their opinions, not their interests, and often not even their relationships. It feels like everyone is constantly at a trade show, promoting themselves and trying to make the right impression, even to themselves. Americans have become uniquely insincere, not necessarily because they are consciously lying, but because so much of ordinary social life has become a performance.
People increasingly behave like influencers even when they are not influencers, have never been influencers, and have no intention of becoming influencers. They present their tastes, relationships, politics and personal problems as though they are creating content or curating a brand. The imagined audience has become permanent, even when no real audience exists, or when it consists only of people with whom they would normally have been genuinely sincere. Even among friends, family and partners, people often seem to be managing how they come across rather than simply being present.
America has always been commercial and self-promotional, but it did not always feel this hollow. Regional cultures used to give the country more substance. Different places had their own accents, habits, loyalties and social types. They could be provincial or unpleasant, but they at least felt real. Over the last 20-30 years, much of that has eroded. People move around more, spend more of their lives online and increasingly speak in the same phrases, hold the same packaged opinions and consume the same national culture, paradoxically even more so than when there were fewer TV channels (and sources of entertainment), because that was at least limited to a fairly small part of people's lives.
Social media is obviously part of it, but I think the problem is broader. America now seems to be developing into a kind of anti-culture. It does not merely lack a strong common culture. It actively dissolves the conditions from which culture normally grows: continuity, inheritance, local attachment, privacy and a sense that some things should exist without being explained, displayed or monetized.
What replaces them is a culture of "self-invention", consumption and signaling. You are expected to construct an identity, advertise it and constantly update it. Nothing is simply inherited or taken for granted. Everything has to be chosen, announced and turned into a statement about who you are. This makes the culture exhausting and unpleasant to almost everyone outside it, and probably to many Americans themselves.
The recession of woke culture has not improved this, in many ways it has made things worse. Woke culture was extremely performative, but it at least provided a fairly clear set of approved signals, that people knew didn't necessarily mean anything. Now that its dominance has weakened, the habit of signaling remains, but the cultural landscape is more fragmented and competitive. People have to signal constantly and compete in their signaling.
Everyone now has to prove that they are more authentic, more radical, more normal, more masculine, more compassionate, more anti-establishment or less easily offended than everyone else. Even rejecting performative culture becomes another performance. The result is not greater sincerity but a louder and more desperate struggle to project a recognizable identity, rather than being something. People often talk about wanting to see "the real" 'place' when they're going on vacation somewhere but in America it feels like the real place has disappeared.
Immigration may also play some role. Continuous demographic change makes social cohesion harder, especially in a country whose shared identity was already fairly thin. America no longer seems confident enough to assimilate people into anything substantial and the people immigrating seem less interested in integration. What America offers instead is consumerism, work, legal citizenship and the freedom to assemble a personal identity from whatever is available. It's not offering an attractive cultural value proposition, it's deconstructing their own and other people's culture into something empty. This isn't a new critique but it has become more true over time.
This may be why American culture feels increasingly alien. It is not simply foreign. Foreign cultures can still feel human because they are rooted in a place, history or shared way of life. For example, I intensely dislike Islam and to some extent Arab culture in general, but when I go to say Jordan, the culture at least feels real. I get the sense that contemporary American culture often feels rootless even to Americans. It is less a culture than a system for stripping existing cultures down, commercializing their most visible features and "selling" them back as lifestyle choices and branding. It's not just that there is increased hostility but that all human interactions feel less genuine and real.
Of course there are still genuine people and communities in America. But they increasingly seem like exceptions that survive in spite of the dominant (anti)culture. What outsiders encounter most often is something synthetic, restless and spiritually vacant. America feels like a preview of what happens when social life is completely absorbed by markets, media (legacy or social) and personal branding.
That is probably part of why the hostility is getting worse. People do not only resent American power or arrogance like they did during the early war on terror. They sense that American culture is becoming an anti-culture, one that makes everything more artificial wherever it spreads. They dislike it partly because it is unpleasant, and partly because they are afraid their own societies are heading in a similar direction, and to push back against that is to push back against americanism in a way.
Quality post, may Allah curse Universal Culture. However, I have become painfully aware that this process is happening almost everywhere, at different rates; America is just ground zero for postmodernity. America has lost much of its Americanness, but Britain has lost an awful lot of its Britishness, Turkey has lost some of its Turkishness, even Africa has lost a bit of its character. I look forward to revisiting Ukraine sometime, to see if the antidote to postmodernity is in fact brutal trench warfare.
You could visit the Balkans to check that right now.
I would say in my experience they are significantly less postmodernized, especially Albanians, though it's hard to connect that directly to the 1990s (I think the basic function is how rich a country is) and it's now been a long time since the war. Hungary is billed as reactionary, but it's actually well ahead of the rest of the Balkans in the process.
Hungary, thé one without the brutal civil war, checks out.
Also the focus of the tender embraces of its richest native son. One could also chart the rise of right-populism in Eastern Europe as a metric of the advances of a hostile postmodernity to which they're reacting.
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