NEW YORK – Amanda Gorman’s remarkable reading of her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony moved millions. It was reason enough for a major Dutch publisher to decide to entrust its translation to a prominent literary figure. But the election of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, International Booker Prize Winner, a white novelist who identifies as gender non-binary, sparked immediate outcry from black activists in the Netherlands, who demanded that, because Gorman is African-American, someone else do the translation. black (there were even those who expressed “pain” over the decision of the publisher). Eventually Rijneveld withdrew from the project.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in Japan, local supporters of QAnon (a conspiracy theory of the American far right) have begun to add their own wild fabrications to the shared belief that Donald Trump was robbed of the presidency. QAnon’s Japanese supporters are convinced that sinister foreigners rule Japan behind the scenes, holding the imperial family responsible for a myriad of evils ranging from the atomic bomb to the devastating 2011 earthquake. QAnon’s members idolize former (now disgraced) US General Michael Flynn.
For better or for worse, the influence of American culture remains as strong as ever. In this sense, at least, it is highly exaggerated to say that the United States is in decline. Even with the rise of China, the enormous prosperity of the European Union, and the shameful spectacle of the Trump presidency, people around the world continue to search for cultural and political clues in the United States.
The fear of the cultural influence of the United States was once the heritage of the right. Prewar European and Japanese cultural conservatism deplored the vulgarity of American mercantilism, the uprooting of its multiracial immigrant society, the strident liberalism of its political institutions. The example of the United States was seen as a threat to social order, ethnic homogeneity and high culture. The political extremes, of course, meet: the far left deplores with equal emphasis the worldwide spread of American capitalist culture (‘cocacolonization’).
But in reality, one of America’s most successful export products (besides Coca Cola) is the culture of protest. Do not forget that the revolution in the American colonies inspired the French Revolution. Students from around the world demonstrating against “US imperialism” and the Vietnam War in the 1960s were following the example of other students in Berkeley and Columbia, listening to protest songs from the United States. And in some cases (like Andreas Papandreou’s in Greece), anti-American politics borrowed many of its ideas from American universities.
America’s main attraction – despite its many institutional flaws, its record of racism, and its outbursts of moral hysteria – has been the promise of more freedom – economic, political, artistic, and sexual. That is why in the 1930s and 1940s, many left-wing refugees who had fled Nazi Germany chose to settle in the United States, while the more conservative chose Britain.
Today the question is whether this wave of American influence brings with it the promise of more or less freedom. Some will argue that “critical race theory” and gender politics, the cause of upheaval on American college campuses and in the progressive press, represent an expansion of freedoms, especially for sexual and racial minorities. But many of these issues are rooted in traumas in the history of the United States, just as it is possible to draw a link between the importance that Americans place on the act of public repentance and some religious traditions of the country.
Do these aspects of American culture allow for an exact projection to other societies? Can the American obsession with “identity” and “representation” in countries with very different histories mean the same? What reason is there to demand that a Dutch person of color translate Gorman’s poem? Why does a French high school whose name is reminiscent of a French mathematician (Sophie Germain) have to change it to that of an African-American activist (Rosa Parks)?
We might also ask what greater freedom it is to remove books by Western classical authors from the classroom in the name of social justice and “decolonization.” This is undoubtedly another form of protest culture as well. But the ideological zeal behind much American activism on issues of race, gender, and identity has aspects that resemble popular movements of the past: its puritanism, its quasi-religious fervor, its intellectual intolerance; in short, the opposite of more freedom.
Extremism on the left has its fiery reply on the right. As well as the “culture of awakening” (woke) spreads to progressive universities and media outside the United States, as does the (often scarier) effects of right-wing insanity, what historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.”
The example of Trump and his illiberal, xenophobic and openly racist rhetoric has already inspired countless authoritarian politicians, emerging from the margins of what were once robust liberal democracies. QAnon’s growth in Japan is the clearest example of the export of the paranoid American style.
It is possible, and perhaps necessary, to trust that moral hysteria in the United States will disappear and reason will once again prevail. Perhaps the Biden era will counter Trumpism, and the tolerance so often admired in American intellectual life will take on new life. It can even occur while the ill effects of American influence are still raging in other countries. The only thing we can hope for, for the good of America and the world, is that it be soon.
Translation: Esteban Flamini
Ian Buruma
Autor de The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021. www.project-syndicate.org
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