Is American Culture Simply Bad Now?

The world order is changing. So is the United States’ place in it.

By Nadja SpiegelmanEuny Hong and W. David Marx

Produced by Vishakha Darbha

Has America lost its monopoly on cool? The Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman joins the American expats and authors W. David Marx and Euny Hong to discuss how the world views U.S. culture and whether its cultural exports still have the lasting impact they used to.

This episode is part of “The New World Disorder,” a series exploring the disintegration of the postwar international system and how countries are adjusting as America steps aside.

America Used to Be Cool. What Happened?

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Nadja Spiegelman: American culture has been globally dominant for decades: Hollywood, bluejeans, jazz, hip-hop. How is that culture faring in a time of so much global disruption? And how has the rest of the world realigned while we were busy thinking about ourselves? I invited the writers W. David Marx, the author of “Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century,” and Euny Hong, the author of “The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture,” to talk about American cultural soft power and its impact around the world.

Welcome, Euny and David. Thank you so much for joining me.

W. David Marx: How are you? Thank you for having us.

Spiegelman: I’m so excited to talk to you both about so many different things. The first place I wanted to start is: You’re both Americans, but you’ve both lived in other countries for the past 20 years or more. David, you’ve lived in Tokyo for over 20 years, and Euny, you’ve lived in South Korea, Germany and, currently, you’ve been in Paris for over 20 years.

One thing that I noticed when I moved to Paris in my 20s was that people were really excited to reference American culture to me as this shared culture that we all had, but it was quite different from the culture I had grown up with. Like, everybody was really excited about “Malcolm in the Middle,” which was not a show that anyone I knew in America had ever watched or referenced. And so I’m curious: What surprising elements of American culture do you see around you? Not like Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Marvel films, but surprising ways in which people embrace American culture, maybe differently than they even do in America.

Hong: Well, since you mentioned France, there are two recent innovations that have come over in the past I would say five to 10 years, and these are brunch and pastrami.

Spiegelman: I love that pastrami is really what they’re into. I remember when I lived in Paris, people were really into brunch, but brunch was also something I had never experienced this way before. It was like a 30-course meal with lots of little different pots of food.

Hong: Yeah, I think they first heard about brunch because of “Sex and the City,” believe it or not, but it didn’t travel over. And then when they introduced it, French people do not have breakfast food in the middle of the day.

They just don’t do it. And they’re very picky, as you know, about when a croissant is fresh. You do not get up at 11 o’clock — well, first of all, you don’t get up on Sunday morning. You don’t meet your friends, and you don’t have pastries after noon. It’s already bad by then. So, yeah, they don’t really have this in-between thing, or they didn’t until recently. So that was really surprising for me.

Marx: In the case of Tokyo, the amount of vintage stores that sell American 1980s high-school gym T-shirts and all these other forgotten bits of American culture is very shocking to people when they first come here. And so you’re surrounded by Americana all the time in Japan, but it’s a little bit detached from the real America now. So maybe contemporary pop culture in America is slow or doesn’t really catch on, but this kind of imagined version of America is everywhere. And then there are things like City Bakery and Dean & DeLuca and all these institutions of New York that no longer even exist in New York that are still strong in Tokyo. Tokyo feels, sometimes, like New York when “Sex and the City” was still on the air, but it’s still going here in Tokyo.

Spiegelman: I’m curious how American culture is perceived where you are, and I’m also curious how that’s changed.

Marx: I mean, from the perspective of Japan, obviously, it was occupied by the United States after World War II, and so America, jazz and American consumer goods became the reference for aspiration. So people may have had ill feelings toward the United States — or may not be interested, necessarily, in America as a geopolitical entity — but they loved jazz and they loved American clothing, and they aspired toward that.

And so that kind of continued, and at some point — especially, let’s say, during the Vietnam War, when there was real resistance against American military presence in Asia — then you get a real split where people hate the United States, but they love this Americana that still exists. And so Americana is just a huge part of Japanese life. At this point, it almost feels Japanese. It feels completely detached from America. And so then, when you kind of catch up to now, I think the question is whether the United States is creating these new kinds of culture that are really inspiring people in the same way, that are aspirational in the same way?

And so in many cases, yes, hip-hop culture has been massively influential globally. There’s no question about that. It’s really fun to go to countries around the world and you hear the local music and so much of it has trap beats, as if it’s been directly influenced by Atlanta or something. And so there’s these elements still where America has an advantage, that America can make the coolest music in the world. But oftentimes, other parts of American culture, kind of the way people live today, don’t get as inspiring to people — or it’s the Japanese version of a thing that is maybe more interesting. So the core of these American ideas still seems influential, but America may not always get the credit for the end product.

Spiegelman: That’s interesting. And what about you, Euny? How is our culture being perceived? Do people think America is cool in Paris?

Hong: Well, I would say that there are two separate versions of American soft power, or American pop cultural influence, in France — and this is the influence of Brooklyn versus mainstream America. One is going up: Brooklyn is going up; mainstream American influence, I would say, is going down. And these are on two separate axes that do not cancel each other out. You know, it started in an area of Paris that kind of looks like Williamsburg a little bit — warehouse-y — and then it spread to the rest of Paris.

But the American mainstream soft-power axis, I would say that it has diminished. I started to notice the effects radiating out of the second Gulf war. And my employer, France 24 — my first employer in Paris — exists because of the waning of American soft power, because Jacques Chirac said: Well, America’s invading these places. Fine. That’s just what they do. But why do they also get to tell the story? Why is CNN the narrator? Why can’t we be the storyteller?

And that was sort of the beginning of the end. I’m overstating it because it’s not as if they hate America now. When you think of soft power, I think of Regina George from “Mean Girls.” Like, everything you do is cool if you’re popular, no matter how dumb it is. And if you’re not cool, then everything you do is just, you know — you’re a pariah and nobody wants to do it. Recently, two things have happened that have put America into the pariah category: One is when France voted that abortion would be enshrined in the Constitution. This was a direct consequence of where America was going and France saying: We cannot stand by this.

Now, if it were the case that America still had omnipotent soft power in the world, they would not have done this. Then there was the CPAC, the conservative convention. I forgot where it took place. And the head of the French National Rally, the far-right party, Jordan Bardella, was supposed to speak there. He was invited to speak. And he backed out because he was so embarrassed by what he saw.

And again, if it were the case that America were omnipotent in terms of soft power, any French politician — I can remember a time when any French politician would have jumped at the idea to appear and speak at an American political convention. Things have changed, and now, he’s like: No. I will lose votes; I cannot be seen with this uncool kid with the bad skin or whatever.

And that is very recent. That is very recent.

Spiegelman: I’ve been wondering how much has changed, specifically since the second Trump administration. And I also just want to define some terms, because I feel like soft power is a thing that people can use to mean a lot of different things. David, how do you define the term “soft power”? Where does it come from, and what is the history of this idea?

Marx: So the term “soft power” comes from the scholar Joseph Nye, who really used it in the context of international relations. And so “hard power” is coercion and threat, and “soft power” is countries just liking other countries and doing things for those reasons. And there’s been a long debate whether soft power actually leads to geopolitical outcomes.

If you look at the Cold War, there is a case to be made that people in the Eastern Bloc started aspiring toward American pop culture, and maybe that helped create the feeling of wanting to liberate themselves from the communist regimes. But I think for other countries — let’s say Japan, which has really tried to focus on the soft power question — whether they’ve gotten better geopolitical outcomes because of interest in Japanese pop culture has been a big question that is still........

© The New York Times