Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
The tracking shot of the Ford Bronco looked good on the BBC that night. Then, when the murder trial came around, Sky News did sterling work. Even aside from the live courtroom footage, there were authoritative digressions into college sports lore and the ethnic map of Los Angeles. In fact, there was just one flaw in the British coverage of the OJ Simpson saga.
The audience hadn’t the faintest idea who he was. Before the televised car chase, if more than one person in 50 could name Simpson’s sport or what his initials stood for, I’m a Dutchman. This story was nothing to do with us. Yet the editorial decision to give it such thorough broadcast treatment seemed natural. When a nation is the unchallenged power on Earth, its internal dramas are everyone’s business.
Well, 30 years on, China is the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity terms. Its military has reduced the gap with America’s. Sanctions drawn up in Washington can be withstood or evaded with once-unthinkable ease. In most material senses, the US has undergone relative decline since 1994. You might expect its hold on the world’s attention to fall correspondingly.
Instead, it has intensified. When a man dies at the hands of a Minneapolis cop, protests take place in other continents. (That didn’t happen with the Rodney King beating.) In Europe, both the “woke” movement and much of the alt-right reaction against it are American imports. And the US isn’t even trying to do this.
We have a bizarre situation here, but there are precedents for it. America is going through a familiar phase in the lifespan of empires, where the hard power fades and the softer kind grows. In the 1920s, more than a century after France lost the Napoleonic wars, and therefore its place as Europe’s leader, Paris was the art centre of the world. It continued to define good taste in matters cinematic and gastronomic for much longer than that. The European love of Chinoiserie, too, grew even after Europe had overtaken China in technological terms.
How does this happen? How does a declining power continue to captivate? Because of, not despite, the decline. When a nation no longer has unilateral control over the things that matter, it is easier to embrace its cultural products. Resentment doesn’t get in the way. You can patronise in both senses of that verb.
And so the world has come to think about America to a degree that is now out of proportion with its effective power. No one wins from this. For non-Americans, it isn’t healthy, or becoming, to live vicariously through another place.
At the same time, it isn’t good for the US to be the world’s goldfish bowl. Its public life is fevered enough without hundreds of millions of half-informed voyeurs on the other side of the glass. Being able to command effortless attention can also lull a country into a false sense of omnipotence. The cultural prestige of France was a psychological cushion, no doubt, as the nation slipped from the high table of world power. But it might also help to explain the instances of over-reach, whether in Algeria or in the endless Gaullist pipe dreams of serving as a “third force” between the west and its enemies.
When Simpson was born in 1947, the US had a nuclear monopoly and around 40 per cent of world economic output. (I suggest Harry Truman, the president at the time, was the most powerful human being who has ever lived.) When Simpson died this month, the US, while still number one, could feel the hot breath of the chasing pack on its nape. Yet, for all the scrutiny the place still gets, you wouldn’t know anything had changed. His death was the top item on lots of non-American news outlets. What was just about excusable in 1994 is flat-out weird in 2024.
It wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t a rival power to think about. Almost half a century into its economic aggrandisement, China is a closed book to the average westerner. Which of us could name its biggest celebrity scandal? Which of us could name its biggest celebrity? Given the language barrier, our monomania for the US is understandable. That is not the same as tenable.
Email Janan at [email protected]
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here
