Manufacturing Americana

A few months ago we read Seva Gunisky’s piece “Yankee Go Home” that he wrote for Persuasion. He articulated a lot of what we often find ourselves talking about as we watch the U.S. entertainment industry collapse and the global order shift, so we were very excited to speak with him about his piece.

To give you a bit of background, he basically argues that the “the organic triumph of…. art, music, media, consumer brands and, on a deeper level, its norms and aesthetics” was “America’s most formidable and least appreciated strategic asset.” But that has started to change. He notes: “The country is still on top of most global rankings of cultural influence, but it’s descending from a peak that was probably unsustainable. The 2026 Soft Power Index, for example, saw the United States declining more steeply than any other country. (To be fair, this is an index built on little more than clickbait and vibes. But when it comes to cultural power, vibes are what counts.)” More on this from Seva below….

This interview was conducted by Noelle Forougi for franknews, and condensed for clarity. Help keep franknews free and for the public by subscribing below.

Do you mind introducing yourself?

My name is Seva Gunitsky. I’m a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. I’m from Russia originally — I mean the USSR, I guess, when I was there. I have lived in the U.S. for a while, and now I teach in Canada. I teach international politics, and this is my third country of residence, so I have a personal investment in the international dimensions of life.

How old were you when you moved?

Almost 11.

I got to know your work through an article you wrote for Metropolitan Review, which you start on a personal note. You mention your friends being taken with American cultural output — Levi’s, Ray-Bans. I am curious to hear from you on what your perspective of the U.S. was growing up was like.

For me, and my friends, it was just very trivial things, like chewing gum or Nintendo. Well, nobody had a Nintendo, but we’d heard of people who had one… like legend. Things like the very vibrant packaging of American food. My grandma was the first to move to the U.S., she moved to New York, and she would send us cereal sometimes, Cap’n Crunch. But the packaging was so appealing, like nothing like the packaging we had. I don’t know if you know, in Canada we have this No Name brand. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. They package food — very simple branding, minimalist. There’s no pictures, right? Which is sort of trendy now… but that is how the USSR packaging looked. So American packages was kind of shocking to me as an eight-year-old.

Totally. How did American culture get so dominant? From your perspective?

I mean, it’s probably two things. One, a lot of it was anti-authority. You know, rock and roll, don’t listen to your parents, that kind of thing. But also, that anti-authority vision was backed by a very powerful financial great-power behemoth. You could use the power of the American market to deliver these anti-establishment messages. I guess that was appealing to us because… I mean, it sounds so childish, but it felt like rebellion.

Do you think there something inherently better about the story America used to tell about itself, or is was it just a lack of competition?

You mean like the sources of Americas cultural decline?

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah, it’s hard to say, because it feels like everybody’s complaining about cultural stagnation. So it may not be an American thing. We’ve just sort of reached a point where we’re recycling each other’s culture. I keep hearing these complaints, “all the celebrities are the same as 20 years ago, all the movies are remakes of things from 30 years ago.

You hear that cross-countries?

Well, I know in Russia there’s not a lot of cultural avant-garde at the moment. It’s all very safe and recycling tropes too, but probably for different reasons than in the West. It doesn’t pay off to be culturally bold in Russia right now.

So interesting, so it might just be a broader problem. It’s, like, the phones...

I mean a lot of it is online, so who knows the selection bias in that. And it could be the case that when we’re living in it, we don’t see what’s at the forefront of culture. We don’t really know what will be novel until later. So it feels like things are stagnating, but you could also point to new things, new kinds of cultural expression. Like people keep bringing up overturning the Hollywood formula with Barbenheimer or whatever.

Right and I mean obviously, movies have been a dominant American cultural export. My dad’s from Iran, and literally half of the stories he tells me are about going to go see an American movie with his brother and he remembers truly every detail. And I think probably a large reason he ended up in American… well a large part was luck and chance.. but at least part of it was an idea of America downstream of production.

That’s interesting — also interesting because Iran has its own film industry too.

Right — which he also loves and makes me watch on Youtube while he translates line by line <laughs>.

Anyway, to me, I think there are two things going on in America — the collapse of the film industry via an obvious consolidation by these tech companies that care primarily about the bottom line. But then there’s also another thing happening, which is a global power shift and move away from a unipolar moment of American dominance. So I guess I am trying to figure out which came first, or how they fit into each other.

That’s a good way of putting it, because you’re talking about the internal sources of decay versus the external sources — that would be the easiest way to distinguish those two. I don’t think it’s really an issue of which came first, because it’s one of those things where the arrows point both ways everywhere. The relative decline of the U.S. prompts certain sectors to be more cautious, including in movies and things like that. So these things feed on each other to some extent.

Right. And do you find, I guess as someone who grew up with a different perspective, the story that America is telling about itself has changed? You mentioned an “anti-authority” energy…

Well, it depends on what level you’re looking at. Certainly at the level of the administration, that’s not the story of America they want to tell. Their story is basically “stay away, and if you’re here, leave.”

But I don’t think that’s the same story as an immigrant. I still have some faith in the U.S. as an exceptional country. I know people who immigrated to, say, Europe, or Germany, and they talk about their problems assimilating into those societies. They don’t feel truly German no matter how long they’ve lived there, and they’ll never be accepted as such. Whereas the U.S. truly is kind of a vibes-based nationality. Anybody can become an American if they have those American elements in them, whatever you want those to be. Anybody can be born an American, even if they’re born outside the U.S., anywhere in the world. They’re born American; they just haven’t found their home yet. It is a vibes-based nationality rather than an ethnic or blood-based one. And I don’t know, maybe that’s a utopian view of the U.S., but at least when I was growing up, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was a compelling view of the U.S. I don’t know how much of it still holds for people who are 20 years old somewhere in Eastern Europe, or Africa, or Asia. I don’t know how they see it.

Yeah, that’s a really interesting and I think good way to put it. I definitely see that in my family’s experience.

I wonder if it’s different for you, because you were born in the U.S. to an immigrant family, so you probably have a very different perspective on the U.S. than he does, I’d imagine.

For sure.

And I do think, politically, that’s the kind of American story people need to tell. There has to be something to aspire to and build on, or we are in a nihilistic, depressed place.

Well, it’s hard, because the right has been so good at building a coalition based on the opposite — that the U.S. is actually bad and needs to be reformed. They’ve been, to me, surprisingly successful at basically bashing their own country,. So I could see why there’d be attempts to copy some of that on the left as well. I could see why it would be at least useful, if not healthy, to have some degree of liberal patriotism on the left, as a way of uniting people around a good cause, if nothing else, as a way of organizing people.

Yeah, actually there was a lot of talk about Zohran’s Fourth of July speech, because the right was like, “Oh, he is shit-talking America.” But if you listen to the speech, he was sort of intensely praising the ideals of the founding fathers, and the ideal of America, with a group of people who had just been naturalized behind him. A lot of people noted that as a shift for the Social Democrats because a few years ago he was knocking over a Columbus statue or whatever...

Well, you know, those two things are totally compatible. Part of being a liberal patriot is knocking down the Columbus statue. That’s part of the liberal tradition, the progressive tradition of America. But as a land of promise of sorts, I think that’s maybe what he was alluding to. I think you can knock down the statue and feel completely at peace with yourself. I think those two things go together.

<Laughs>. Totally, that is totally American.

Shifting a little bit to your book, your thesis is basically that hegemonic shifts happen from shifts in international systems, not necessarily from a revolt or revolution or from elites. Is that a correct understanding?

I’d say it’s more like this: when we think about why a country becomes democratic, or why it has a democratic revolution, we often look at what’s happening inside the country, which makes perfect sense. But the argument I’m making in the book is that these local transformations or uprisings often happen in cascades or waves of transformation that transcend national borders, because of shocks to the international system….a big war, an imperial collapse, an economic crisis. These create structural global conditions for waves of transformation. When we look at the history of democracy, we see these waves of transformations, then a rollback, then time passes, then another cascade. That’s true for communism and fascism too, although we don’t have as much good data there. So the question is why these transformations happen in waves, and to answer that you have to step outside individual states and look at what’s going on in the international system, and how those pressures shape the costs and benefits of revolutions and transformations at the national level.

Now, what causes these shocks is the great question. But answering it fully is like asking what caused World War One, or World War Two, or the Great Depression, people have written bookshelves on that. But you can always take the chain of causation back another step. The key question is: once we have this geopolitical shock, bracketing its causes, what are the consequences on regime change and the evolution of domestic institutions? The goal of the book is to push back against domestic theories of democracy, which are important, you do have to know what’s going on inside the country, but you also have to look at the international situation. For me, it’s the intersection of global and domestic politics where the really interesting stuff happens.

There’s also something unique about hegemonic shocks and hegemonic collapses specifically … a transformation that stems from a shock wipes the slate clean and allows changes and reforms that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. The most famous cases of successful U.S. regime-building, Germany and Japan, happened because of their defeat in World War II. These unique conditions created by shocks are what allow collapses to become transformative. You can’t look at the evolution of democracy in the 20th century while ignoring those moments of hegemonic collapse and shock.

We spoke to Professor Richard Wolff, who spoke some about this… but there’s a lot of talk about collapse of the international order, the petrodollar, we’re obviously in the middle of a war. Do you think we’re at another shock moment?

The previous shocks I looked at in the book, the two world wars, the Great Depression, the Soviet collapse, are all relatively sudden, with overt violent destruction or very clear geopolitical disruption. We haven’t reached that point yet. But look at the last hegemonic shock, the Soviet collapse. That was kind of self-imposed, through Gorbachev’s reforms. Hegemonic collapses can happen from the inside as well as the outside. It’s very possible the U.S. isn’t immune to these things either. We’re seeing something unusual under Trump, almost a hegemonic suicide, where there are planned changes by the superpower that undermine its own standing in the international system and inside itself.

So I don’t want to rule anything out at this point.