This is the fourth in a series of posts exploring my preference for broadly framing any issue/news story/trend/development in our world. As I am now on vacation, no follow-up to any comms right now.
Realizing this is a federal holiday (and my favorite as I was born on Memorial Day in 1962), I’m excerpting one thread from America’s New Map to make my “broad framing” argument on what I describe in the book as the Superpower Brand Wars of this century.
Consider it my love letter to America on this national holiday.
THREAD 42
WE’RE STILL THE ONE: THE DURABILITY OF AMERICA’S SUPERPOWER BRAND APPEAL
Jim Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”
Our brand’s positives far outweigh its negatives. Yet many Americans regret how those attributes shape our world. We should be more cognizant of how we model behavior.
There are many reasons for America’s incredibly powerful brand appeal:
★ Political ideals—explained in our founding documents and copied the world over
★ Sheer power—first expressed as our nation’s unprecedented domination of the global system after World War II, gracefully degrading ever since
★ Presumed global leadership—our leaders are de facto world leaders
★ Military capabilities—go-to disaster-reliever, global cop, and crisis responder (“Send in the Marines!”), plus the only force with genuine global reach
★ Prosperity—huge market that has long shaped global value chains
★ English—global reach of language, ease of use, acceptance of foreign words
★ Innovation—persistent wellspring of technological breakthroughs that go global
★ Work ethic—Americans live to work instead of the other way around (sigh!)
★ Education—finest teaching and research universities in the world mean we educate the world’s top talent, retaining many for life
★ Ubiquity of culture—inescapable, loud, and constantly evolving
★ Modeled behavior—nobody loves their own country and culture more
★ Self-confidence—Americans walk down any street like they own it
★ Cool factor—nobody else quite sets that global standard like we do
★ Defining youth culture—rap and hip-hop are just the latest examples
★ Representing the new—consistent global trendsetting
★ Rebel mindset—per our origin story, a cultural throughline of iconic loners taking on the system and winning against all odds
★ Freedom—Americans live and work where they want, buy what they want, worship how they want, wed whom they want, and say what they please
★ Empowerment mythology—ethos of the self-made person
★ Eat-what-you-kill mentality—with surprisingly little social contempt for those who strike it rich and lord their wealth over the rest
★ Anything can happen here—a fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) attractor
★ Empty vessel—as anyone can make it big in America, big dreamers the world over project those ambitions onto the US landscape
★ Ability to commercialize anything—Americans can and will make a buck off anything, creating demand where previously there was none
★ Responsiveness to consumers—American business obsesses over American buyers, meaning we produce what consumers want most
★ Ability to market anything—in America, products find you!
★ Lack of traditions and fixed tastes—means we will try anything, which makes us a perfect laboratory for productization
★ Sex sells—as we are both incredibly prudish and pervasively pornographic
★ IT productization—our big tech companies lead; the world copies
★ Glamour—our influencers/celebrities shape global consumption
★ Cultural velocity—we are the royalty of virality and memes
★ Icon production—name a global icon, and odds are they’re American
★ Simplicity of culture—we are not hard to figure out and easy to access
★ Incorporating outside cultural influences—learning how to sell to immigrants, we learn how to sell better to their homelands
★ Our Xs are better than their Xs—any nation’s emigrants succeed more here
★ Urban Black aesthetic—our most consistently impactful cultural export
★ Future-oriented—our short memory means we welcome change
★ Optimistic outlook—we try anything because we expect to succeed
★ Road warrior mentality—most of us originally left everything to come here, so pulling up stakes for a new opportunity is in our blood
★ Environment—America has it all in terms of variety, and our ability to keep it reasonably clean earns us global authority in that realm
★ Everything is bigger—creating a certain shock-and-awe factor
★ Masters of entertainment—we know how to put butts in seats
★ Hollywood—70 percent of its total revenue comes from foreign markets, while 97 of the 100 all-time highest-grossing films are American
★ Masters of digital content—we know how to capture and keep eyeballs
★ Musical genres—we have invented and globalized jazz, gospel, country, bluegrass, soul, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk, disco, heavy metal (with the UK), electronic (with Germany), house, rap, grunge, and hip-hop
★ Fashion—prevalence of American designers and influencers
★ Sports—popularity of baseball in Latin America and East Asia, global reach of basketball and golf, expanding generational appeal of X Games
★ Holidays—spreading observance of US-style Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother’s/Father’s Day, Halloween, Earth Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.
★ Haters—even those who despise our culture tend to be obsessed with it
Americans veer between pride in our global influence and embarrassment over what many in our world consider to be brand detractors, such as our:
★ Culture wars—and their coarsening of public dialogue and behavior
★ Gun culture—appearing more out of control with each passing year
★ Institutional racism—pervasive despite protests, movements, and reforms
★ Police misconduct—creating levels of citizen distrust not seen in decades
★ Treatment of kids—extending culture wars to children seems unnecessarily cruel
★ Treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and non-straight non-cisgender identities (LGBTQ+ community)—vindictive targeting of vulnerable minorities
★ Immigration system—constantly vilified and never adequately reformed
★ Obesity epidemic—costing us plenty and constituting America’s deadliest export
★ Healthcare—the only highly developed nation without universal healthcare
★ Reproductive rights—bucking the global trend of increased access to abortion
★ Science denialism—most notably on vaccines and climate change
★ Political violence—a growing fascistic quality reminiscent of Weimar Germany
★ Xenophobia—featuring an increasingly apocalyptic tone among Whites
Both lists compare well to any generated by our competitors, each of whom, if objectively calculating win-probability, would trade their brand for ours. America thus enters this contest advantaged, the only question being our will to succeed. There we must turn to leaders capable of reimagining our hemispheric relations.
