What is your counterargument to "Americans have no culture"? Serious long-form answer, no imageposts.
As a Greek-American, I have a unique perspective on this; because I can compare American culture to my ancestral culture; the culture; the culture that gave the world mathematics, natural science, medicine and works of literature that are still mandatory courses of study for high school students world-wide. A culture so vibrant that the Romans themselves just Romanized the names of our Gods and eagerly adopted them as their own; not so much adopting our culture as merging our enlightened ideas of intellectual pursuit with their pragmatic, down-to-earth engineer’s mindset to build works of architecture still revered today for their beauty, functionality and longevity.
And all that glorious, beautiful culture has done Greece diddly squat.
Look at it. Look at Greece; a nation impoverished, mocked and maligned; a nation that’s become the Mexico of Europe. That’s not a joke; back in the 70s the rail line between Greece and Germany was called the “Athens express” for how many Greek migrant workers rode it. The EU’s One Currency To Rule Them All guaranteed that someone in the bloc, unable to devalue their currency to manage changes in the global market, would emerge the loser, and once again it was Greece. The Greeks only participated in the 1930s Olympics because wealthy Greeks in America took up a collection and sent it over to them, and Greeks in America are still better off than they are in the homeland. Greece, the nation that invented democracy, soon forgot how to use it; they were ruled by a military dictatorship from 67 to 74 in a tragicomic reversion to the spasms of tyranny that sometimes gripped Athens in Classical Antiquity. Their civil government denies them many important rights; such as firearms ownership, and is only held in check by a combination of Greek’s inborn anarchist spirit and a woefully incompetent civil government that makes Italy’s civil service look like the fucking Swiss. Building a house in Greece is sometimes tantamount to filing a lawsuit due to this. And that’s to say nothing of the “anarchists,” i.e. the fucking communists who still firebomb the occasional building and contribute to a constant, low-level civil unrest significantly worse than anything antifa has managed stateside.
So tell me, if you can - what has Greece’s vaunted “culture” done for it? What has it done for Greece, with its worm-riddled civil government, its impoverished people, with hoards of Middle Eastern refugees that Europe refuses to deal with? What has it done for Greece, having married into the globalists wet dream of a Unified European State, only to find that it was the designated loser? What has it done for Greece, which, having forfeited its economic independence to the globalist agenda, then finds itself left to defend itself with what little GDP it has left for military expenditures, now that Germany has gutted its own army, France still doesn’t give a single begotten fuck about alliances that don’t immediately impact their own interests, and the UK is worried about scraping the cash together just to defend themselves? Pray tell, what, exactly, does Greece have that America does not?
America has media empires that resound across the world; the reach of Hollywood is vast. Donald Duck, Porky Pigs, Bugs Bunny are recognized from the Mongolian steppes to the savanna of sub-Saharan Africa. Our cultural influence on the globe is so mighty that Buick is still a big fucking deal in China, despite the globalists having willingly given away our role as world manufacturer to China itself, for the Chinese remember the impoverished days when the Party big-wigs all rolled around in American-built Buicks. American culture is a unique cultural attitude towards violence where a finger-poke counts as assault in many jurisdictions, but lays the necessary groundwork for the only country of its size on Earth where most people have the right to carry a loaded weapon on their person for the purpose of self defense. American culture is a strain of individualism matched only by its innate suspicion of government; a frontiersman attitude, not an inability to work together, as alt-right collectivists allege, but a pragmatic mindset that says nobody is coming to help you, or even nobody is going to help you in time, and thus frees people to help themselves.
Even the comforts of our modern age cannot dull this; as it is written too deeply in the structure of our laws and the stories of our national mythos; the default reruns on daytime broadcast TV around here are old Westerns like Bat Masterson or Rawhide. One of the most incisive observations of Japanese culture I’ve ever seen I found in The Atlantic of all places; the commentary on how Japanese TV is always played in the background, a passive venue for programming responses that people then execute, word for word, at social events, as the author grouses towards the end. The American version is nowhere near as deliberate, of course; just our culture’s older mythos being churned up like a cow chewing her cud, but it’s there - and it’s all cowboy western ass-kicking or, at night, 80s action-movie asskicking. We mine it because that’s all there is to mine, from the bottom up.
And what are the effects on Americans? If you strip away innate advantages of provenance and wealth? If you deny him his technology and money and pit him against enemies of homogeneous ethnicity and Strong Ancient Cultures, rifle to rifle, bayonet to bayonet, hand to hand? What emerges then?
You find the men who took the Omaha and Utah beacheads with only rifles and grenades, after half their armored support floundered in the channel, preparatory bombardments missed their mark, and American faith in technology and firepower overall failed, and miserably.
You find the Marines who held Edson’s Ridge against the Japanese, emerging victorious from brutal hand-to-hand combat in the dark.
In short, you find victors. Of the governments who’ve opposed us, many no longer exist - and yet we are still here.
So where, exactly, am I supposed to detect America’s alleged lack of “culture?” The performance of our society in total war has been superlative; even our most astounding fuck-ups demonstrate just how bad an idea it is to piss us off. We have a national mythos of our own, complete with great heroes and their noble quests. We have icons and monuments built by our own hand, often to venerate those heroes. We have our own land; one we had to fight for, bleed for, and tame, one that is ancient and filled with natural wonders of staggering scope and beauty. And we have the same collectivists and fifth-columnists and globalists that Europe has, except they hold less sway here, despite the much-vaunted Culture of Europe’s ancient nations and peoples.
So where is the tell-tale? Where is the casual link between America’s fortunes and her alleged “lack of culture?” For that matter, where is the casual link between Europe’s cultures and their fortunes? Where is the evidence? What even is the point of that phrase, “America has no culture?”
The truth is that there is none; it is empty sloganeering of the “just asking questions” kind; trading entirely on trolling witless neoliberals incapable of defending the inconsistencies in their own platforms due to their inability to acknowledge reality. The alt-right never has to defend their platform as a coherent theory, because their only detractors are either fellow collectivists who share their basic premises and care nothing for critique, as they are of the out-group to them - a different collective - and thus not even human. With the lolbertarians trivially easy to keep on the defensive, that leaves nobody, nobody at all, as the actual constituency of the GOP, that have rallied behind Trump would’ve been called centrists thirty years ago and want nothing to do with collectivism, no matter what collective it claims to defend.
The vast majority of them are full of shit, and it is not hard to prove it.
