Is the charm of the American empire of markets really as indestructible as it is surreal?
"At least for China, President Donald Trump is a gift that never ceases to give satisfaction". These are the words used by Minxin Pei to introduce his analysis on China-US relations and the repercussions of the choices and actions of the respective rulers, reported by Internazionale. All the chaos generated by the words of President Trump and the clashes over the outcome of the elections are in fact a veritable boon for Chinese propaganda.
This, together with the hostile policies pursued in recent years by the American government, will only increase the consensus and popularity of the Chinese one, also serving to smooth the tone and actions of traditional allies who, shouting "the United States first", have found it really difficult to persevere in building a broad coalition that could, in any way, counter China.
And so, once again, it may have been the Americans themselves, this time through their president, the cause of the arising of misunderstandings, resentments and hostile attitudes internationally. Many are watching and hoping that the election of the Democrat Biden can also serve to prevent and mitigate events of this type.
In the wake of Al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, marketers vowed to review the bad image of the Market Empire. The communication strategists set to work: was Islamic terrorism perhaps the consequence of some basic misunderstanding of American arguments? Perhaps the "global marketing machine" that had advertised the typical habits and products of the American way of life had somehow fueled a profound misunderstanding of the positive values inherent in Western material culture?
An “America First” Policy in indeed it hadn't been felt since the early millennium, when the Global War on Terror unleashed by the Americans would have turned into one of those endless wars that take place when great empires fight against their own decline, causing chaos .
And this, in the book "The Irresistible Empire" by Victoria DeGrazia, it is an unequivocal sign of the fall of the "great empire of the market", or rather of America which, with its business democracy, has assumed for decades the leadership of the struggle for the conquest of the world by peaceful means.
"Let your ideas and your imagination spread throughout the world and, strong in the conviction that Americans are called to bring freedom, justice and humanity wherever they go, go abroad to sell goods that are conducive to comfort and to the happiness of other peoples, converting them to the principles on which America is founded"
(President Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Detroit July 10, 1916)
As De Grazia points out several times in the text, in his public speech, President Wilson placed the accent on those shrewd devices, on that seductive communication, on that calculated empathy that are usually identified with The consumer society. Thus adopting a purely American notion of democracy, what could be defined as a "democracy of recognition", based on a minimum of common elements, such as wearing the same shirt or the same sneakers, or even the same brands.
An image to export calculated down to the smallest detail. And, when this image falters or turns out to be distorted with respect to intentions, we promptly try to run for cover.
On October 2, 2001, the Bush administration gave Charlotte Beers, celebrated in the world of public relations as the queen of branding, a new position within the State Department, appointing her undersecretary for public diplomacy and public relations. In March 2003, when the Bush administration waged war on Iraq, Beers resigned for health reasons. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a week before stepping down, he concluded: The gap between who we are, what we would like to appear, and what others see in us is frighteningly large.
Up until the XNUMXs, the advancement of American consumer culture, for better or for worse, really seemed like the leitmotif of global progress. It was a revolutionary force, endowed with social inventions and a right-to-welfare message as effective as a political revolution in choosing old ties. However, a revolution is not permanent by nature, changes course, runs out. Or the principles and institutions it defends spread so much that they are no longer identified with the original promoters. New forces come into play. It happens that the solutions of the past are transformed into problems of the present.
Though perhaps the United States is still the most dynamic force propelling the current global consumer culture, for sure they no longer exert a technological influence such as to monopolize innovations neither in production nor in consumption. And this justifies many of the President Trump's trade concerns. And screaming American supremacy couldn't be enough to call the bluff, just as, at the beginning of the new millennium, the initiatives taken by the government to take over sales management had ended up revealing that the art of selling had become not an instrument of statecraft, but a surrogate for it and the disturbing showcase where the politics of the Empire, with its global bellicosity, was exhibited.
At the time, amid the uncertainties of global public opinion, US companies no longer knew whether it was profitable or not to associate the sale of their products with the sale of the image of the American nation. And, now that multinationals have globalized, nothing prevents the pioneers of multinationalism from falling victim to global predators.
Could Biden represent an effective safety net for the image, even before the operations, of the old irresistible American Empire of the Market?
Reference Bibliography
Victoria De Grazia, The irresistible empire. The American consumer society to conquer the world, Giulio Einaudi Editore, Turin 2006 and 2020.
Original title: Irresistible Empire. America's advance through twentieth-century Europe.
Italian edition translated by Andrea Mazza and Luca Lamberti.
Victoria De Grazia teaches European History at Columbia University in New York. On the Italy of the twentieth century you published Consensus and mass culture in fascist Italy (1981) and Women in the fascist regime (1993). With Sergio Luzzato you edited the Dictionary of Fascism (2002).
