The Hegemon and the Hegemon

European anti-Americanism is deeply America-brained

Should I, a Briton, treat the US as a hostile nation now? That’s the view of some, not least since US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene slapped a British reporter sharply down for attempting to ask questions about that whole Houthi bombing group chat thing.

“We don’t give a crap about your opinion and your reporting,” said Greene. “Why don’t you go back to your own country. We have a major migrant problem […] You should care about your own borders. […] Don’t you care about people in your own country?”

Trump haters called Greene a “national disgrace” for this diatribe. Over here, someone posted “I have no respect for any Briton who defends the United States’ behaviour anymore. This is not an ally but an openly hostile nation now.”

Now, I don’t want to waste ink on litigating whether or not Marjorie Taylor Greene is A Good Thing in absolute terms. But this brief exchange interested me, in that it crystallised something I’ve been reflecting on since US Vice-President JD Vance made that notorious speech in Munich a little while back, berating European nations for enabling mass immigration and suppressing free speech. Namely: the paradoxical way European elites are both reflexively anti-American, and also totally America-brained.

In Britain, for example, the demographic that yelled loudest for us to remain in the European Union is also much more likely to be intimately familiar with US politics than that of our near abroad. Glance at the front page of the BBC’s or Guardian’s news sites on any given day and you’re far more likely to see headlines from Washington than Berlin, Strasbourg, or Paris. This is also the set that Greene rebuked, in the person of that British journalist, for seeming to care more about American politics than British borders.

And it was, by and large, much same group who went bananas in the aftermath of the Vance speech in Munich. This was a deeply schizophrenic experience from my vantage-point: there was American rightist jubilation all over my X timeline, but on the British and European side the reaction was much more mixed. Among perhaps half my Right-leaning British friends, the reaction was warmly positive: finally, someone with real clout was saying things that needed to be said. For others outside America, though, the immediate reaction was defensiveness, anger, even hostility, and all with an undertone of contempt for the America of longstanding European stereotype, all cultural ignorance, brash opinions, and coarse, over-familiar manners.

This pub sign exemplifies what I mean:

Let me be clear: “infantile” does not describe any of the Americans of my acquaintance. But that it’s possible to put a sign like that up in a British public space tells us two things. Firstly, the sign-writer assumes Americans can be treated as a legitimate outgroup. And secondly, which insulting stereotypes are prevalent about this outgroup: specifically, the familiar Old World memeplex that dismisses America the infantile, a place of coarseness, clumsiness, and potentially destructive naïveté.

I haven’t spoken to many in Europe recently, but we can take as a possible indicator that something analogous is felt there, the fury of that most Europhile of American luminaries, the liberal journalist Anne Applebaum. It’s a reasonable bet that Applebaum is fairly well attuned to the mood among European elites, and going by her recent output, it’s not “God Bless America”. Shortly after Vance’s speech, Applebaum bemoaned the passing of older American stereotypes, such as the “quiet American” or “ugly American”, in favour of one she attributes to the Trump regime and especially to JD Vance: the “brutal American”. (No doubt she’s added Rep. Greene to that list too, now.)

The memelords got straight on with enjoying their new favourite epithet, of course:

But this recoil from perceived Trumpian boorishness and bullying ignores the pervasive and ongoing dominance, throughout Europe, of the other America. This isn’t the America of “you don’t have any cards” or “we don’t give a crap” or “go back to your own country”. It’s a sensibility that suffuses elite assumptions about everything, and continues to wield considerable cultural and political clout despite no longer being formally sponsored by the White House. We could characterise this version of America as the political outlook of the Global Blue Team, governed by a reflexive aversion to borders, hierarchy, overt power, and distinctions of any kind and operating by preference through pre-political institutions, indirect influence, propaganda and scolding.

But though my conservative American friends may not love to hear it, this Global Blue Team is every bit as much an America-powered phenomenon as any of those aspects of American culture variously celebrated or decried as emblematic of the Trumpian sensibility, such as hard military power, entrepreneurship, or treating your political opponents brusquely on camera. Until very recently, for example, this America used USAID for moral terraforming: a near-bottomless pit of US taxpayer money, which operated globally through a dizzying array of proxies to fund progressive propaganda (DEI movies in Ireland, for example, or the notorious “transgender opera in Colombia” but really so, so much more) and otherwise pitch-roll for the Global Blue Team worldwide.

So considering how generous some of those payments, and how unchallenged this infrastructure remained for how long, it’s perhaps unsurprising that despite the formal change of leadership and ideology at the imperial core much of Europe’s elite remains fiercely loyal to this Global Blue Team . There are plenty of policy examples, but let’s pick just one, vividly illustrative one, from public monumental sculpture: a statue recently erected in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.