The Global Export of American Culture

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The founders worried that the American experiment they'd devised would soon collapse into disorder, tyranny And here we are, a quarter millennium later, in another time of deep anxiety Virtue is under threat, talkal of decline is in the air. public life is scarred by division. So, the economist has gone to town on the anniversary. This week's print edition is filled with thoughtful essays and deep analysis of that experiment And we, here in the podcast department have soberly put on our birthday hats and done some reflection too Consider when the Republic was barely fifty years old, and a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tacqueville undertook what must have been one of America's first road trips brilliant, insightful, kind of timeless resulting book is what my colleague John Prido relied on when he repeated the journey for our new series Toquville Road Trip. Make some time to crisscross America today as seen through that lens. And John and the cast of Checks and Balance out later today will be looking at the separation of powers across the branches of government, another founding father preoccupation that's worth examining now. But here today, I'm going to be joined by three colleagues to chat through three narrowly defined facets of America, then and now The state and the resilience of its democracy, its perennial fits of policy on immigration, and its undeniable status as a mammoth exporter of culture So in our London studio is our deputy editor, Robert Guest. Down the line in Atlanta, we have our southern correspondent Rebecca Jackson And then Chicago, Daniel Knowles, our Midwest correspondent Hi everybody. Hey Hello Hey, it's great to be here Now I want to start with a big question, perhaps the biggest question, and one for all of you to get started. How would you characterize the state of American democracy as it stands two hundred fifty years in I think it's in better shape than it looks There's obvious stuff you can see. We have the president who shows the least respect for tradition, for the law, who's enriched himself more than any other president in history and who has a very tenuous relationship with reality So far, the institutions are holding up reasonably well. I mean, only this week, the Supreme Court said to him, you think you can abolish birthright citizenship, but it's there in the Constitution? No, you can't. And if you're going to be pessimistic, you say they also reaffirmed his power to sack a bunch of people within the government. But you're looking at the back and forth, I think a lot of this would have been famamiliar the founders, they would have said, yeah, it's a difficult project, but it's lasted two hundred and fifty years. It's battle tested. I think it'll last the next and a half I feel profoundly pessimistic about American democracy and the birthright citizenship ruling, unlike that being a source of optimism as it is for Robert for me, that just seems terrifying that for Out of nine Supreme Court judges decided that the president can apparently just go against the plain text of the Constitution with an executive order. That seems to me a real real threat and that's one of an awful lot of things. So I actually disagree with Robert. I am really pessimistic I'd say I fall somewhere in between the two of you. I think that from my perspective, one of the things that has scared me most recently is the fight over redistricting that we're seeing playing out across America. This spring, another massive Supreme Court ruling was that the court curtailed the reach of the Voting Rights Act, which for decades had put constraints on politicians who wanted to rig the maps entirely in their favor. And basically now we're seeing is that Both Republicans and Democrats are in this what we're call, know sort of an arms race to the bottom. And one of the reasons that I'm most worried about the fate of democracy is that in the upcoming midterms, there'll be very, very few competitive congressional races. And that's not because there isn't disagreement on politics and policy, but it's because the districts will be drawn so carefully candidates basically become shuans And so that means that Americans whose views are different from those around them, say, a Democrat in rural Georgia, or Republican in Boston, basically no longer have a voice in our democracy So at the mention of the Constitution and a kind of erosion of what perhaps the founding fathers intended here, let's talk about the power they placed in the executive in Article number two of the Constitution Pident was vested with a great deal of power, and it's been co opted by one person by now in a way that we think we haven't seen before Do we think that is the new norm in the way that redistricting is the new norm? or or is that something you think America can walk back from Clearly they can walk back from it. One of the ways that the system is being tested at the moment is, and this is maybe something that the founding fathers got wrong, I don't think it really occurred to them that you would have a someone has personally immoral in the top job be that he would have the kind of hold over his party that the current incumbent does. Now that's quite a rare coincidence There are constraints there. He's term limited, he'll be gone in two and a half years. I think it's unlikely in the near term future that we would have someone else who was both bad and at the same time despite that, was able to maintain the cult like hold over his own party. So this is something that should spring back quite sharply after the next presidential election Robert, I agree with that. I mean, I think if you look at JD Vance or Marca Rubio, the two people most talked about as the front runners in the Republican Party for twenty twenty eight, Clearly neither of them command that kind of cult like following that Trump does. I think on the other hand, you can't talk about Article two this week without looking to Monday's Supreme Court decision in Trump v slaughter, which basically gave the president in the short term authority to fire the FTC chair, but more broadly gave him control over roughly two dozen government agencies were I guess once considered to be independent even if culturally and politically'll be able to roll back some of the president's power, I think the more it becomes enshrined in the legal precedent, the harder that will be. mean America has been in much worse places before. I had a whack and gr civil war in the nineteenth century and that was much harder to recover from, although eventually they did Dression was probably worth. the period of trying to deal with segregation and get rid of that was worth. And all these things have led to renewal. And I think looking at Trump today, an awful lot of this is bound up in the unusual personality of one man And that man is extremely unpopular. It is abundantly clear that his party is going to lose the House in the midterms this year, which will put a constraint on him.Quite possibly loses the Senate as well, although that's much more touch and go And I do think that if things carry on the way they are at the moment, when you come to the next presidential election, whether it's Vance, whether it's Rubio, the country will want to change. and the system allows the voters to demand that and get it. I think all of what Robert just said is true and yet a number of precedents have been set here that any president will want to use and perhaps sometimes should use. I just don't think the toothpaste goes back in the tube when it comes to presidential power But when it comes to power being handed over to an eventual democratic administration eventually. The issue, it seems to me, has a lot to do with the sort of zero sum nature of American politics now. notot working on the American project together, but only working against the other guy. Rebecca, you've been doing some reporting on the state of division in the nation. What's your take on that Yeah, I mean, Robert, you mentioned the Civil War in fights over segregation, and that's particularly vivid in my mind this week because I was just down in Montgomery, Alabama. And I'm writing a piece for the paper this week for our july fourth edition that looks at the contrast between what they're doing there and what's happening in Washington. And I think one of the starkest things that I'm seeing just in the rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration is this attempt to erase history, filter out the bad Last year, Trump issued an executive order that was titled, I think, Roring Truth and Sanity to American history and called on basically all these federally funded institutions to wipe out to censor any kind of information that cast a negative light on America's history. And interestingly, in Montgomery, Alabama, which was the cradle of the Confederacy, a place where there used to be more slave trading depots than churches also the place where really the civil rightights movement came out of, the city is dealing with things extremely differently, and it's sort of a rebuke to Washington right now I was there last week and Brian Stevenson, who's the head of the Equal Justice Initiative, has basically transformed the entire downtown of the city into a museum or monument to slavery and racial terror. And that interestingly, has transformed the city economically. It's making tourism boom and is allowing them to revive themselves in a kind of astonishing way we're coming to is this clash. How does America see itself in recent polling that we reported on this week Democrats and Republicans, there's a huge gulf in how patriotic they feel. And I think part of that is coming from a sense that we just see this country, its past, and its future really differently completely agree with Rebecca that the attempts by the Trump administration to whitewash history are reprehensible But they're also visible, they're not going to work The federal government doesn't control the schools. There's also the entire cultural industry, Hollywood, academia. When Trump does something like this, it almost enhances people's desire to argue about this and to highlight both the bad things and the good things of history. His lasting legacy on our understanding of history is going to be about as long lasting as the little bits of guilt that he's super gluesed to the marble in the Oval Office. Robert, I think there's certainly some truth to that, but I think it also discounts the fact that MAGA has become a grassroots movement across the country, right? And school boards are in some ways sort of ground zero for that. We've seen groups like Ms for Liberty put tons of resources and effort into electing peopleople who do want to whitewash this kind of history to the school boards, to the county commissions. And so I think you do see a lot of changes happening from the ground up. And I think that is quite scary Is it different though from what you see in other countries? You go to somewhere like Russia and there's lots of people who actually remember Stalin fondly. You go to China, Mao is still a national hero. You go to Britain, there's lots of people who can't remember who Churchill was. But Robert, isn't that quite scary to compare America to Russia and China I mentioned Britain as well. And I used to live in Japan and you know the sort of understanding of what actually happened during World War I there is pretty skimpy. I think you have unrealistic expectations if you think people are going to have a historian's level of understanding of history, but I think basic things, slavery existed, it was terrible. segregation existed, it was terrible. I think it would be extremely hard to stamp out some degree of knowledge of that Along the way there, Rebecca mentioned this question of how does America see itself? I'm sort of wondering how the world sees America in this moment. when all of this dysfunction is on display I've been thinking about this a lot actually. Last year I went to visit some friends in Canada and turned up and all these Canadians were asking me, why would you go back to America? Why haven't you left? Place seems a disaster When you come back across the border and you talk to people certainly in the Midwest, there's bearing an awareness of how angry people outside are. travel around the world all the time. And so I'm under no illusions as to how upset people are about the current administration. But if you step back for a moment, America is going to remain the preeminent technological power, the preeminent power producing innovation one of the preeminent cultural powers and the preeminent military power in the world for some time to come And so people will continue to pay attention to it. And people's moods do change depending on what they're seeing in the news on oldld enough to remember the transition from George Bush to Barack Obama and you saw views of America flip dramatically in a positive direction. And even, according to some polls, people didn't just have a more favorable view of American democracy and American culture under Obama than they did under Bush. They actually had a more favorable view of the American landscape, which obviously had not changed. So I think if you looking underlying thing about America is it's the power that you cannot Ignore. that produces lots of good things and lots of bad things and that It will continue to evolve and people will continue to engage with it, which is just not something that you can say about most other countries What if Saled businesses I scale my philanthropy. if I did as much in one year as I've done in my whole life? See how your wealth could have even greater meaning at creativeplanning dot com slash impact. This podcast is sponsored by Made in Cookware. Madeiden partners with multig genererational artisans and some of the world's best chefs to create professional quality cookware, knives and kitchen tools Their products are trusted in Michelin Starg restaurants worldwide and designed to perform just as well in your kitchen From five ply stainless clad to carbon steel, every piece is built to last and made to actually make you a better cook Discover award winning cookweare at madeincookweare. com But one way in which America continues to evolve is in its attitudes towards migration. Before we go on, I'd like to play you a little dispatch from Eron Braun, our West cooast correspondent. Americans have been arguing about immigration since the country's founding. In his first message to Congress as president in eighteen oh one Thomas Jefferson insisted it was too difficult for newcomers to become citizens Shall we refuse the unhappy fugitives from distress, that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe Alexander Hamilton, his rival and an immigrant himself actually favored restrictions The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment on a uniformity of principles and habits, on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice This debate over how welcoming America should be is woven into the very fabric of the country We've seen it resurface again and again as new waves of immigrants have arrived on America's shores The first big influx of immigrants came to America between eighteen twenty and eighteen eighty Most were from northern and Western Europe Nearly two million Irish people arrived during this time, driven from their homes by famine By the summer of eighteen forty eight, East Coast newewspapers first published accounts of gold in California Around the same time, California's gold rush lured Chinese migrants to the west coast. Animosity towards Chinese laborers grew. And in eighteen eighty two, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law to restrict immigration to America based on race or nationality A second wave came between eighteen ninety and nineteen nineteen, when more than eighteen million people arrived, mostly from southern and Eastern Europe. Many of these new Americans came through Ellis Island, and they settled mainly in industrial cities By nineteen twenty, close to fifteen million of them had crossed the Atlantic They often found themselves living in desperate conditions, with housing in the cities becoming more and more crowded Then, more backlash, more suspicion New legislation closed the door to would be Americans. In nineteen twenty four, Congress enacted a strict quota system that would limit immigration for the next four decades It is a proud privilege to be a citizen of the Great Republic to hear its song sung to realize that we are the descendants of forty million people Who left other countries? Americans like to describe their country as a nation of immigrants. That phrase was popularized in the nineteen fifties by then Senator John F. Kennedy. I think it is not a burden privilege his successor in the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson signign the Immigration and Nationality Act in nineteen sixty five That law ended the quota system and established America's modern immigration regime Over the next century, The share of immigrants from Latin America began to grow. Introduction of refugee protections in the nineteen eighties meant asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America started arriving at the southern border, but many were turned away And so church leaders in Arizona and California inspiration from the activities of the underground railroad. And so We began to smuggle folks across what we thought was very secretively. And that gave birth to the sanctuary M These churches and the borderlands inspired cities and states to enact sanctuary policies of their own Policies that have recently put them at odds with the federal government The Justice Department is now suing New York City over itsation is suing Los Angeles accusing city leaders of blocking federal immigration enforcement. Over the last two hundred and fifty years, American attitudes towards immigration have shifted from openness to exclusion and back again. Right now, America is in the midst of yet another backlash. The border is closed The wall is being built. detention centers are full and visas are hard to come by. But an optimistic reading of American history suggests that immigration restrictionism is only temporary The country's Hamiltonian impulses Again give way to its Jeffersonian ones Danel, I want to start with you. You've been covering protests in Minnesota and IS deportations this year Talk us through what that has been like, what's really stuck with you It was very intense. I remember coming back to Chicago from a reporting trip in Ober when the big deportation effort was getting going. and I remember these helicopters flying over my house and it feeling like a trip I did a long time ago to Kabul. Then there was this huge intense reaction to it. people started taking immigrants into their homes, delivering food to people. And then people got shot, countless people got beaten up. Chren at a Halloween parade got tear gassed a whole bunch of armed, militarized border patrol officers didid a pelling raids down into an apartment building and lined up a hundred or so people outside in handcuffs, many of whom turned out to be American citizens, none of whom turned out to be the gang members they were supposed to be. And then it all happened again, even more dramatically in Minnesota in January, you had two American citizens very much peacefully protesting gunned down by agents of the state and then denounced by America's leaders as domestic terrorists. There was then a pullback from the brink a bit that the administration has changed its tactics, but the real sense that This Immigration policy is also a domestic politics policy that it's a way of remolding America into a more conservative perhaps whiter less dise kind of placeac. I think that's what an awful lot of people felt Rebecca, how do you see this playing out on your beat in the south Immigration enforcement looks very different in the South. In Republican states, local police and jails are very willing to cooperate with the federal government. Most immigration arrests actually happen in cities and red states. So places like Miami and Houston are picking up way more people than Minnesota, San Francisco, Boston you haven't seen the kinds of clashes that Daniel's describing. Generally, I'd say things have been Much quieter. And that in itself is causing problems here too. Back in March, Robert and I took a trip to the southern border in Texas. and we were talking to lots of Latinos there who basically are horrified by the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, the fact that they're picking up grannies rather than the rapists that they promise to. And that is really changing the politics in the region We talked to a lot of people in the construction business and people who were ardent Republicans, who basically were saying that the extent to which Trump was making it impossible to run their businesses because they were just coming to construction sites and picking people up meant that their politics were changing. These were people who were actually considering voting for Democrats or just sitting out the election come November In her piece, Erin mentioned again this narrative of pendulum swinging of this being cyclical. I wonder if that is the view we should take about immigration this time around. What's your view on that, Robert I think that some things today are fundamentally different from how they were in Jefferson and Hamilton's D. Transport technology has changed. You can basically get to America from pretty much anywhere in the world in a day That means that because wages are spectacularly higher in America than they are in most places and it's a really nice place to live An awful lot of people would want to come there if they were allowed to America, like all other rich countries, needs to have some kind of way of regulating who comes in the future And voters everywhere are pretty keen that they have some say And what happened under Biden until he reversed course It is similar to what's happened in parts of Europe that You had a situation where a lot of people were coming through the asylum route And that just meant the country didn't have capacity to find out whether that was true or not, whether they really were fleeing persecution, and then theyd just disappear into the labor market America, very much more so than other rich democracies, has an immigration system that is quite generous to relatives. You can bring your parents or your sisters and brothers, you can sponsor them to move here in a way that I don't think is true in many other countries. And actually exceptionally difficult for economic migrants and becoming more so, the system is incredibly slow. Even if you qualify, it's capricious. It still works in physical paper. I can tell you that from personal experience. I kind of worry that such as a division in America and the inability of Congress to get anything done, that even with a political pendulum swinging It's going to be hard to create that rational immigration system from anybody, really. And so it's going to remain this argument about who is an American and who deserves to be here that I fear is not going to go away Even with a big political swing. I think also when thinking about potential policies going forward, I think it's important to recognize that the political overton window has just shifted so dramatically. This week, I'm reporting on anti Muslim sentiment that's com out of Texas and being nationalized. And one of the things that struck me most is that in this conversation, which I think is born out of the Christian nationalist movement, there's this question of who is really American and who deserves to be American Part of that is that several congressmen are actively calling on the country to start deporting Muslim Americans And so I think using immigration enforcement as a tool of punishment for people living in America also feels new to me. And perhaps that will be more lasting Fundamentally the American system for assimilating people still very robust You can see that with a comparison of ethnic Somalis who settle in Minnesota with the ones who settle in Sweden. The ones in Minnesota are much likelier who have jobs to learn the local language, and that's because the American labor market is just much more welcoming to people than most European ones are So the country's ability to make people belong is still there It's nonetheless possible for populists and for haters to spoil that Before discuss the people coming into America who want to come into America, I'd like to shift focus a bit to what's coming out of America, broadly the export of American culture. For that, let's hear from our senior culture correspondent and friend of the show, John Phazma S. Clair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature in nineteen thirty, the first American to do so He writes the new language, American, said the Swedish Academy's seecretary in presenting the award. He asks us to consider that this nation is not yet finished or melted down It is still in its turbulent adolescence American authors of Lewis' era and before were anxious about whether there was even an American culture worth writing about Twain made his argument on the page, writing the American vernacular But he was the exception. Henry James, Ernest Hamingway S Scott Fitzerald and others escaped to Europe to work Those days are long gone Americans have since won twelve more literature noobels The same is true in other cultural fields The Lumiere brothers were film pioneers, but Hollywood built the modern film industry. Here we've been stuck in this pipe sized town for nearly a month It's enough to drive a guy goofy. Gourmets may turn up their noses at fast food. But you can still find the Glden arrches in more than a hundred countries with other chains including Burger King and KFC not far behind here Pizza was invented in Italy, but America made it a global phenomenon. But you know, we were thinking about you, you know, we ordered the Joey special. Two pizzas It's music in which America has had the biggest cultural impact The blending of European and African influences in America created jazz and blues, which created rock music. Hip hops spread from the Bronx to every corner of the world Contemporary music is unimaginable without American, and specifically African American influences. Our panelists will discuss the reasons behind this cultural dominance But I'd like to get the ball rolling by offering two of my own theses First more than any other country on Earth America is an assimilation machine Anything in any one can become American And second, America is really good at advertising marketing It not only makes a lot of great books, music, food and so on gets people to want to consume them Let's start with the first of John's discussion points there, America as a simimilation machine What do you reckon to that I think one thing that's important to recognize is that people like us obsess over politics and what's happening in Washington, but most Americans are paying much more attention to culture. And I think that's true outside of America too. I don't think that we've seen such a dramatic shift in the way that foreigners view America's cultural exports. One example of this is that just being in the South, I have to mention country music. Country music has exploded both across America, but also across the world. And it's kind of hilarious that you have people in London and in Singapore singing Morgan Wallen, a bro country guy coming out of Nashville, Tennessee. And I think that that is still extremely potent regardless of what's happening in the Trump administration We in a cover story recently pointing out that the portion of Netflix shows and pop songs that people were listening to around the world. which got a lot less American than it was before. And I think this is partly because other parts of the world have been copying the American ability to take influences from everywhere. They've taken not just American stuff, but you see the Kpop bands with singers in them, you see Japanese video games incorporating bits of Chinese folklore With that said, there's still no country that compares with the US in terms of its cultural influence over the long term around the rest of the world and that has contributed as much to people's sense of fun. I think the Netflix thing is really interesting in that one of the things that surprised me most living in America the past five years is how much British teelevision is consumed by Americans. and so the broader platform thing Robert's completely right, it's both spreading American culture overseas, but it's also making Americans more exposed to The world, I think that's entirely positive. Now clearly, from the basis of everything that's just been said, this is all changing very fast. but for the moment, we can rely on quite a long history of American cultural exports. And we have asked you to come with your personal favorite, your number one American cultural export. Rebecca, start with you Okay, well, I thought this conversation was a little bit too high brrow, so I have decided to go a little bit more day to day and I will say the iconic ice cream sandwich. Okay why. First of all, I just think the ice cream sandwich represents everything that is amazing about America. I looked into where it came from. it turns out that street vendors started selling it in New York City in the late eighteen nineties for just a penny. and it was a food that was cheap enough for kids to buy for factory workers, for immigrs, really anyone could afford it Almost a decade later, the chip whichich, which is a chocolate chip cookie version, was invented in a sweet shop owner's basement in Brooklyn. and I will say I think that is now my go to gas station ice cream and it should be yours too. Other brands are available. Daniel, what did you bring for us I pick folk music because I've been listening to a whole bunch of Pete Sieger and Bob Dylan and stuff recently, which is kind of new to me. but Pete Sieiger was a big old communist, but the way he sung about America, it's quite inspiring and built on protest movements. and Dylan too and so many other folk singers Coming out of Minnesota, were these protests sng by Mass Atack and Tom Wait of all collaborations you can imagine, but also by Bruce Springsteeen. So I'm just kind of interested. Is there going to be a new protest folk revival in response to these hard times didnn't have you down as a folk guy, Daniel, but so it goes. Robert, what have you got I think I'll go for American satire I think it's a wonderful statement of the anti authority anti rooyalist tendency that's been there in America since the start. And if you compare someone like Mark Twain with Dickens, right? Twain is funnier. books are shorter, they get to the point, they have rollicking adventures. And he comes up with some really profound lines. You remember that bit in Hucklebury Finn where Jim, the runaway slave is asked, have you ever been rich? and he thinks about it And he says, yeah, I'm rich now because I own myself and I'm worth eight hundred dollars And that's not just a satire of slavery. it's a really profound statement about liberty that Freedom means that you own Ething that you're ever going to do or be or create That's wonderful and there's no equivalent of that from Britain Nice Therey good. I was joking with the producers before we got started here that I was going to say my favorite cultural export was cheese whiz, which at least two of you should be familiar with. It's a processed cheese food product. Turns out, I can't call it a cultural export because it doesn't get exported. Thank God. You say that, but you haven't tried cheese whiz use at least to the UK, because there's so little actual dairy in it. call it cheese whizs is like false advertising. so it's really hard to find We're back at Daniel Robert, Thank you very much for sharing all of your insights and for bringing some cultural exports and for helping us celebrate America's two hundred fiftieth delighted. Thanks very much, Jason. Thankks everyone. Thank you and happy fourourth of July