The U.S. benefited from a major sociocultural “superpower” for decades, but now, President Donald Trump’s “cruelty and lawlessness” have that power “crumbling before our eyes,” per a new analysis from The i Paper.
Writing for the outlet on Saturday, special correspondent and columnist Patrick Cockburn highlighted the now “grossly out of date” sentiments from the beloved 1942 film, Casablanca, in which would-be refugees desperately tried to reach the U.S. in order to escape “fascism, violence and corruption.” This image of the country, he argued, “had at least some substance” at the time, and until very recently.
“This benign perception was the basis of American ‘soft power,’ the belief that the U.S. was – with many reservations – a force for good in the world, a view which made it a cultural and political superpower,” Cockburn explained. “This image was reinforced by the extraordinary cultural dominance achieved by American films (of which Casablanca is a prime example) as well as television and popular music. The U.S. was seen as a country where most people in the world felt they would be happy to live, even if they did not take practical measures to go there.”
He added: “But two years into Donald Trump’s second term this once huge American advantage in ‘soft power’ is swiftly disappearing like an iceberg melting in warm water. Trump and his lieutenants are furiously attacking all that was best in American government and society, replacing it with a cruelty and lawlessness.”
The latest “grotesque” example of this decay, Cockburn argued, was the announcement that the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan would be livestreamed for the public to view, a revival of the practice of public executions which “brings the U.S. into line with Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea, and it is only a step behind Islamic State which filmed decapitations and dowsing victims with fuel before setting them ablaze.” This sort of highly visible state-backed violence, he added, has become commonplace under Trump’s second term, be it from the treatment of immigrants by ICE, or from the bombing of boats in the Caribbean Sea.
“U.S. ‘soft power’ was cumulatively built up over the past century, but is now dissolving by the hour,” Cockburn wrote. “Some might argue that America was never as good as it purported to be, but there was much goodness there all the same.”
He later concluded: “In my experience, even those Europeans familiar with the U.S. seldom have an accurate idea of what made it tick. They ignore the impact of its diversity and internal conflicts, which have obvious negative consequences, but they also provide the friction that generates immense political and cultural energy. This creativity and resilience might just be enough to defeat Trumpism, which truly embodies the dark side of America past and present.”