Looking at the United States from the outside, it can seem that the country is all about its politics and its media. And it’s true, those two siblings, conjoined at the hips, command much of the world’s attention. The world spends millions of hours watching content produced by American studios and politicians and made available on American platforms such as YouTube and Netflix. It’s therefore natural to assume that this content is America.
From inside the country, the relentless attention-sucking media and news are even harder to escape. I try by removing anything that pushes news content onto my screens, and I mostly succeed, but it’s hard. Because the media consumes so much of our attention, there’s less left to appreciate everything else the country has to offer.
For one, there is its unparalleled science. Ongoing funding cuts may diminish the advantage America has over other countries, but not eliminate it anytime soon. There’s America’s literature, which I consider separate from its news and television media since it commands so much less attention. There’s a culture of volunteering and civic engagement that is largely independent from politics and that goes deeper than other places I have called home. For example, the amount of effort some parents put into helping out at the public school my kids go to is astounding when I compare it to the near-zero parental engagement at the school I attended in Austria.
America has an even deeper and harder to define advantage though. No other country has a comparable diversity and open-mindedness about what things should be like. The available range of visions of what constitutes a good life, and a desirable society, is more limited in Europe. As a result, there isn’t really anything like the neo-reactionary movement in Europe, but the range of options and possibilities considered on the bright side are much more limited as well.
Many of the strands of thoughts in America are thin, but at least they exist, and if and when their time come, they will strengthen and become mainstream. The fabric they weave is stronger and more diverse than what Europe has to offer. One result is that the range of outcomes that it’s possible to imagine for America is wider than for other nations, both on the dark and the bright side.
Nehaveigur 