Empire?

Bill Whittle has done it again. He destroys the arguments that America has or wants an empire and takes on the topic of hegemony.

However, he notes, quite correctly, that the power of our culture is not obtained through push, but rather through pull:

We are widely criticized among Europeans for what they call our cultural and economic hegemony. They decry our pop culture as vulgar and commercial, and in fact, it often is. McDonald's are now everywhere on the European continent, and we are reminded what horrible, fattening food it is. Agreed.

What doesn't seem to get through their anti-populist, anti-American blinders is that basic economic principle of supply and demand. I suppose we shouldn't be too shocked to hear this. The birthplace, intellectual home and last bastion of Marxism has always had a tough time with economic reality.

They also have a tough time with democracy, and the idea of people -- you know, the masses --making their own decisions. And the thing that breaks the heart of every European elitist is the inescapable fact that McDonald's and Cheers are huge in Europe, because their own people can't get enough of it.

I have never been to France myself, but I would presume that daily life there does not consist of squads of heavily armed US Marines rounding up the terrified population, herding them into McDonald's at gunpoint, and shaking their last euros out of them. When France passes laws saying that some minimal percentage of their television programming (I think it is 50%) must be produced in France, then that is an admission -- and it must be, if you will pardon the pun, a galling one -- that huge numbers of their people prefer our culture over their own.