In the 20th-century the American empire realised it could no longer rely solely on military might despite its need to grow the  Military Industrial Complex, which remains central to its economy and its political hegemony.

Thus, it started to leverage the power of its economic might to promote its so-called culture and “soft power” on others: drive-ins, junk food, B-movies with blondes, trash-talk shows, crude pop music, and streaming platforms as weapons of cultural domination. As the US deployed aircraft carriers and Marine divisions ( having allocated nearly a third of its 1990s defence budget specifically for military intervention within the developing world), it also sent McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Starbucks and its pop icons to the frontlines (remember “Golden Arches” theory?). Going even further, it embedded journalists from media groups in its forever wars to tell us who the good guys are and scare us about our freedom-fighters, their version of “terrorists". These corporations and media groups function as agents of soft-power neocolonialism by aggressively marketing an American way of life, view of the world, that simplifies good and bad, distorts history, prioritises convenience over quality, consumption over community, excess over moderation, profits over wellness or health and crassness over class. This is now all distilled into the Trump administration.

How nations succumbed to this is a separate topic requiring a deep critique of globalisation, free markets and the use of economic power to impose cultural domination. This cultural-economic blitzkrieg, blending corporate power with ideological export, systematically overwrites local traditions with Western ideals, proving that modern empire-building wears not camouflage, but corporate logos.

This cultural imperialism is no accident: the Pentagon still earmarks billions for “soft power” projects, effectively subsidising the global saturation of Marvel movies and McNuggets as ideological exports. Never a beacon of creativity, Hollywood today is a bastion of promoting the American fantasy. It now floods global markets with homogenised super-hero sequels and badly made as well as unnecessary and repetitive spectacles, as with the latest Mission Impossible. At the same time,  building, buying, and operating theatre chains across two dozen countries to ensure crass American themes of rugged individualism, gore and B-grade cowboy machismo, dominate from Johannesburg to Jakarta.

Meanwhile, brands like Apple, Amazon, Starbucks, and Nike, while preaching net-zero myths, relentlessly peddle unsustainable consumerism while social media algorithms of Facebook and Instagram, originally designed to connect, have instead isolated 25% of humanity in loneliness. The leaders of many of these businesses have themselves become caricatures of the weirdness and isolation their tools inflict on society. They are no different from many of the US pop icons, ranging from Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley to, now, Kanye West. It is the American way as most are oblivious to crassness, given that they we brought up in a culture steeped in bombast and the pursuit of shameless celebrity.

An entire book could be written about the products and services America has unleashed on an unsuspecting world and their anti-social impacts. This so-called success of selling crassness without any scruples — convincing a gullible world that this is how free markets apparently function and how individual freedom is expressed — went into shaping the propaganda that celebrated the victory of American capitalism in the world. This, in turn, was moulded into an economic ideology about being the only approach to growing economies to create prosperity. The rest is history with dire consequences the world is now confronted with. Some of these industries, products services as well as approaches to marketing are so deeply embedded across the world that it will take decades to weed out and redesign. A short list of major economic sectors where American crassness is built in, if only one bothers to look carefully enough would include:

• Entertainment
• Finance
• Processed food/Fast foods
• Military Industrial Complex
• Big Pharma
• Pornography – largest in the world
• Business schools
• Media

The backlash: why the world is walking away

American economic might once bulldozed local traditions, replacing them with a homogenised consumer culture. Yet today, the same forces that built its empire now accelerate its decline. The irony is inescapable: China now leads in tech, Europe in quality of life, and South Korea in pop culture influence, while America clings to tariffs and tired blockbusters – proof that hegemony built on homogenisation was never sustainable. Even foreign policy blunders like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has cost millions of lives — America always gets a free pass even when committing genocide — underscore a pattern: the world no longer tolerates American exceptionalism when the evidence is so clear, and results are so conspicuously mediocre.

Rather than innovate, the US resorts to blunt instruments like sanctions and tariffs – a desperate gambit to mask its fading competitiveness, even as the world recognises the crassness of its offerings and retaliates in kind. Even its leading tech firms seek protection from open competition, shamelessly siding with their government in their efforts to prevent Chinese firms from access to chips etc.

At a cultural level consider  Sweden’s fika — a daily ritual of coffee and conversation that prioritises human connection over productivity –which has survived America’s “gulp and go” caffeine culture, where even breaks are optimised for efficiency. There is then the Japanese approach to meals which are served in small portions and where serving and consuming large portions is deemed uncouth. Thus, as the world is rediscovering its own path, America must do the same and decouple from decades of embracing its misguided sense of exceptionalism, which helped drive it into a swamp of crassness: almost anything is acceptable to turn a dime. Perhaps this is for the best: the world is finding itself, and so must America. Let its retreat inward, however reluctant, become an unexpected gift decouple proof that nations thrive not by dominating others, but by fixing their own house first.

The crassness of American leadership

If a culture is judged by its leaders, then America’s current crop of political and business leaders (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel etc) speaks volumes. Trump’s protectionist tariffs and Musk’s Martian colonialism expose America’s schizophrenic soul: a nation that preaches free markets while fearing competition, and denounces empires while building its own among the stars while unable to fix its wide-ranging challenges at home. And at the same time its elite are consumed with fantasy and vanity, ploughing billions into strange ideas about human beings inhabiting Mars. These figures aren’t anomalies; they’re logical products of a system that glorifies wealth accumulation, is addicted to constant entertainment and hero worships celebrities. It is one which also rewards bombast over substance, fictitious valuations over real value. When Vice-President J.D. Vance dismisses the Chinese as “peasants”, he’s not just revealing his own ignorance, he’s exposing the brittle insecurity beneath America’s swagger. America’s unchecked appetite for vulgar excess has manifested in a plethora of self-inflicted wounds: grotesque income disparity,  an underfunded education system charging fortunes for basic degrees and environmental degradation on an industrial scale. If the US doesn’t shed its love and promotion of all that is crass, it won’t just lose its place at the top of the economic and cultural ladder – it may combust under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.