Welcome to our inaugural Student Spotlight. We’d like to thank Pablo Gutierrez de Lario for this piece from IP3020: American Foreign Policy.
Netflix recently released a new series called Emily in Paris. The story is simple: An American woman moves to Paris for a job opportunity. There, she struggles to succeed in the workplace while searching for love and experiencing culture clash with her “boring” Midwestern upbringing. In the series, French citizens are depicted as lazy, unclean, eating baguettes, and doing ‘French things’, while Emily is there to improve her workplace to better, using her American life style.
Of course, the refusal and bad critique for the series in Europe, specially France, has been huge. However, in America, the series has become a big television success. The show exactly shows the perception of how US really is; how we see them against how they see themselves: “The best country in the world, with the best people, the best industries, the best cars, and the best everything”.
It’s true that every country wants its people to think it is unique, in order to keep them from straying, to discourage disappointment in the government’s policies, to help sustain other myths and to be able to count on them to support rhetoric and actions against other nations and their people. But no other country seems to take it to quite the extreme of the United States.
America is different, unique and special to other societies because they lived in the “American Dream”, created from three important pillars: First, a fierce capitalism, where the only people who succeed are the winners, those who are individualist and only care about themselves. That’s where the second most important pillar comes in: “Individualism.” Americans have been trained from early in their lives to consider themselves separate individuals who are responsible for their own situations in life and their own destinies. They have not been trained to see themselves as members of a close-knit, tightly interdependent family, religious group, tribe, nation, or another group in society.
Therefore, the US is all about “winners and losers”.
A perfect example is the news of US President Donald Trump avoiding taxes for many years has seen as “something normal” in the American country due to the exacerbated patriotism (the final pillar) and the sense of capitalism that exists in the US. Obviously, in a normal European society, he would be charge, taken to trial, even jail, and make him pay for his deceptive behaviour. But, in America, it seems Trump, to the eyes of many American citizens, is a “winner” for avoiding taxes, and also for winning the battle against Covid recently, while the tax defaulters or the people who have died for Covid all these months are the losers on this game.
Americans for a long time have considered their nation a shining “city upon a hill,” with the “eyes of all people upon us,” as the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop put it almost 400 years ago. And now, even if Covid-19 grows more and more each day, all that idealistic perspective continues being a very strong thought in the US society.