Walt Disney and the American Mind
17th August 2024
For many Europeans, the American mind is a hard thing to fathom. Considering the cultural influence the United States have exercised over the Mother Continent since 1918, and their political dominance since 1945, it is an important question. Nor are the Americans one is likely to meet in Europe much help—we are hardly representative of our countrymen. Less than 20% of Americans own passports, and a minority of that number actually use them beyond Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. We Americans abroad may be very pro- or anti-European, well-informed or ignorant, but we are not typical.
Even if we were, as a whole, Americans tend not to be very introspective. We may seek the self-affirmation of American Exceptionalism or the self-hatred of Wokery, but the calm pursuit of self-knowledge is not usually in our purview. This, of course, is not uncommon amongst either Imperial or Calvinist peoples; we are both—the latter in a strange, secularised sense peculiar to ourselves. So it is that probing the American mind presents unique challenges even to natives—let alone Europeans.
It has been observed that at the bottom of American differences from Europe lie two qualities: race and space. Certainly, the Indian and Black issues on the one hand, and the sheer immensity of our country on the other, make for a very great difference. So does the great divorce between rulers and ruled, despite the need of the former to corral the latter into election booths every so often. I often tell foreigners that if they want to love my country, they need to take a long road trip through it; if they wish to hate it, they need only to read the history of its foreign policy. The dissonance between the two experiences is astonishing.