While the politics of a country with approximately 800 military bases in 70 other countries and the largest economy in the world naturally has implications that are felt worldwide, there is a broader cultural obsession with American elections, rooted in the idea of American cultural centrality to the world. This is an idea that has been shaped collectively by American corporations, popular culture and politics over decades.
While recording the charity pop song, We Are the World in 1985, a less than enthusiastic Cyndi Lauper is said to have remarked to Billy Joel, “it sounds like a Pepsi commercial”.
And it does.
So much so that scholars have noted similarities between the lyrics (“there’s a choice we’re making, we’re saving our own lives”) and the Pepsi slogan of the time (“the choice of a new generation”). For a song written to raise money for the victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85, We Are the World says nothing about the physical reality of famine, or the political causes of it. An uptempo reference to “people dying” is all there is about Ethiopia in the song. Musically, far from invoking the pathos of famine, the song invokes a childlike feeling of glee.
This makes sense only when we examine American foreign policy at the time. In the context of Ethiopia, this marked the end of decades of direct military aid to the government of Ethiopia (and later to militias opposed to the government) and the start of a new American foreign policy strategy in the region – political dominance through famine aid. It was critical for the American government to divert any concern about the famine (in which one million people died) or introspection over past American military aid for wars that had left much of the land uncultivable, into a joyful exercise of American self congratulations on their benevolence. American pop stars successfully delivered this.
More generally, to the rest of the Cold War world, We are the World presented a collection of idealistic American superstars as ideological ambassadors for freedom, democracy, human oneness, but above all (through the deliberate cola commercial vibe), a free market.
American cultural exports of which We are the World is a great example are fascinating because they typically do two things.
First, they use American products to create a homogenous globalised culture which is often just the spread of American cultural values everywhere (what the French in the 1950s termed Coca-colonisation).
Second, and more importantly, they infantilise the world (quire literally in this case with the assertion “we are the children”) by encouraging them to subscribe to a hyper-simplified American understanding of world affairs. There are good guys and bad guys, and naturally the side your favourite pop stars are on are the good guys. This has historically been extraordinarily effective. In the era where Soviet propaganda took the form of things like cheaper textbooks, the appeal of Micheal Jackson was undeniable.
American presidents have also historically functioned as cultural exports, championing what are termed American values. To do this effectively, they have typically offered a face that sits within the broader idea of America being exported at the time. In 1984, when Bruce Springsteen shot to the top of the charts with Born in the U.S.A, Ronald Reagan was running for re-election. Now there were very fundamental differences between Reagan and Springsteen, including of generation, Springsteen’s far more active concern for the welfare of those left behind, and disillusionment with American wars (best seen in the deliberately misunderstood title track). But on the surface, the aesthetic being exported to the rest of the world was similar – they both presented themselves as white working class men, and both spoke often to their audience of “freedom” as absolute individual agency and not collective liberation. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, Beyonce sang the American national anthem at his inauguration. The signal to the world was that the politics of race in the US was no longer the radical and anti-imperialist politics of Mohammad Ali, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. but a successful quest for representation at the very top of imperialist neoliberal institutions.
In this cultural universe, American presidents are also expected to soft signal to the world what the “correct” side is. And in cases when the president is incapable of that – George Bush Jr for example – American popular culture steps in to bridge the gap. If Bush Jr was too blatantly unintelligent to be appealing, American comedians could mock him for that and showcase instead to the world the freedom they enjoyed to mock the highest levels of power. And if the highly publicised cruelty of the atrocities involved in the American war on terror (including torture, Guantanamo, CIA black sites and Abu Ghraib prison) were to dent that shiny good guy hat, the rise of Barack Obama was to restore it. The fact that Obama was to continue and expand the war on terror with new horrors like the drone strike programme is successfully buried under layers of charm.
Beyond the presidents they choose, American elections are also meant to be a showcase by themselves. As a country that has repeatedly used democracy as an excuse to destabilise other sovereign states, free and fair elections and the peaceful handover of power are more than a matter of domestic stability. They are a virtue to be showcased internationally. Interestingly, Americans still retain the two month long period between the elections and the formal inauguration of the next president, which functions as a build up to a huge production, where their bipartisan commitment to the democratic process is reaffirmed globally.
Kamala Harris at the DNC. Photo: X/@BarackObama
The rise of Trump and the new right has posed significant challenges to this established formula. To begin with, the growth of what American commentators term “culture wars” punctures the long exported illusion of the universality of American values. If Americans themselves disagree on what it means to be American, the world becomes harder to convince. Trump’s rhetoric around elections being stolen, and political violence like the January 6 rowdiness at Capitol Hill further shatter the illusion of an exemplary democracy. Trump’s slogan itself – “Make America Great Again”– implies that America is less than perfect in its current form, which does not sit well with traditional American exceptionalism. Economically, Trump’s vocal advocacy of tariffs and protectionism while not unprecedented also marks a significant shift from the rhetoric of openness and human oneness on which the US advocated for free markets around the world in the 1990s.
The American cultural elite has attempted to step in to repair the holes in the narrative created by Trump with mixed success. Rebranding themselves the “resistance” and championing progressive causes wholesale (whether performatively or otherwise) they did manage to create an alternative vision of American exceptionalism where the rejection by the political elite of American values is compensated for by the admirable benevolence of America’s cultural elite. And yet this has been of limited value. The nature of technology in general has made it harder for nations to project uncontested universal values in the international sphere. Hence while the American liberal elite appeals to a segment outside America, Trump and his followers also find a steady fan base among right wing nationalists elsewhere.
But as we see a bifurcation in the idea of what it means to be American, what remains unchanged is the global cultural space they occupy. Mirroring the formula of every Hollywood military themed film, where the actions of Americans committing atrocities are punished by other idealistic Americans (the rest of the world exists only as silent victims), American elections are now pitched by their liberal media as a battle between liberal Americans and extremist Americans. The fact that this infantile discourse occupies far more space than it deserves is perhaps indicative of how successful the project of American cultural dominance remains. While the nature of the world makes it impossible not to engage with the American politics-as-culture behemoth, it is useful for the rest of us to remember that all sides of American politics today remain unified in their support for imperialism, manifested in their unwavering commitment to the genocide in Palestine, and to preserving the interests of the their corporations. And also, more importantly, that their cultural apparatus (for all its finely marketed rebellion) ultimately serves the same aim.
Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.
Missing Link is her new column on the social aspects of the events that move India.
