Sunday roundup/ American cultural imperialism is not as powerful as it seems

Why US culture wars will backfire in the UK

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In all the deserved praise for Succession few noticed that it represents a triumph of American cultural imperialism.  The series was set and shot in New York and produced by HBO, but created by a team dominated by British writers. The “writers’ room” where they met wasn’t in Manhattan in central New York, but in Victoria in central London.

“There was doubt felt in some quarters as to whether this group of scruffy Brits could pull off a glossy, high-end New York drama,” said Georgia Pritchett, one of the writers.​ ​ And they did need expert advice, not on American culture but on its class system.  The producers brought in a consultant on super-rich mores and morals, whose job “was to explain what it was like to be a billionaire to a group of people who were thrilled that someone was paying for their Pret sandwich.”

Don’t dress the Roy family in coats, the consultant warned. The rich ​don't need them. They ​only spend seconds outside when they transfer between limos, private jets and helicopters.

But then American writers would have been ​equally ​clueless. They, too, would have needed the services of a consultant because, alas, writing is not a trade that propels authors into upper-class circles. ​

The fact remains that American culture has so drenched British writers that they were able to create one of the best dramas in the history of US television. A team of American writers would not feel comfortable enough with British culture to repeat the trick in London.

“Cultural imperialism” with its connotations of conquest and subjugation may be too strong a term to describe the process. No one forces Pritchett and her colleagues,​ ​or you and me, to enjoy US drama, film, and music. We assimilate it willingly. Like the barbarians who became Roman citizens, we welcome the American cultural empire, and want only to join it.

Nor is assimilation an elite phenomenon. English Premier League players took the knee after George Floyd’s murder. He was killed by a cop in a foreign country where the police are armed (they aren’t in the UK), where it took a civil war to close the slave plantations (there were no plantations in the UK), and where the blanket denial of civil rights to African Americans lasted until the 1960s (Jim Crow’s writ did not cross the Atlantic).  Yet it was not an instance of the racism black players receive in British grounds that sparked the protest, but the death of a man on the other side of the world.

As American brute power has declined from its acme in the 1990s, American cultural influence ​appears to have​ exploded.

How easy it is to say that “what happens in America one day will happen in the rest of the world the next”. Conservatives are flirting with the anti-woke politics of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. They work in the US, they reason, why shouldn’t they work here?

Likewise, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and Scottish National Party politicians are adopting the woke agenda, for want of a better term, of US progressives. Presumably, they hold to the “what happens in America will happen here” mentality as well.

If you know any politicians, tell them to study their own country, and then take a cool look at the US. They will realise that their values ​​clash​. British people can enjoy American culture, and as the ​​Succession writers prove, they can create American culture, while remaining almost separate from America​'s i​deological ​ imperatives​.​​

Here is a far from complete account of the differences