The American brand: The U.S.’s best, most influential export
On January 26, 2023, popular U.S. hamburger chain Five Guys opened in Seoul, South Korea’s capital city. The weather was rainy and humid, but South Koreans braved up to twelve hours in line to get a taste of Americana.
The Five Guys anecdote came to mind while reading about tennis great Martina Navratilova’s recollections of Voice of America (VOA) while growing up in Czechoslovakia. Navratilova told the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins that VOA “was our lifeline,” it was relief from bad music and worse propaganda from Czech stations that Navratilova described as “a total joke.”
Jenkins adds that the Czech stations “relentlessly drummed into listeners that there could be no individual aspiration, only work for the state machine.” Thankfully VOA broke “through this wall” of state-sanctioned nonsense. In Navratilova’s words, VOA “couldn’t be censored or blocked,” bringing reality to an unfree world defined by unreality cruelly foisted on the people by the state.
What do Five Guys and the VOA have to do with one another? Realistically everything and nothing. Except that the everything part matters.
It’s useful to think about both as VOA faces elimination, but just as important as TikTok faces legislative banishment in the U.S. unless it finds an American owner. Proponents of this bit of American-style totalitarianism claim TikTok’s Beijing-based creators (ByteDance) could share user data from the globally popular app with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), plus they fear algorithmic-curated propaganda from TikTok will brainwash Americans into buying the CCP view of the world. It’s hard to write the latter without laughing and crying at the same time.
Forget that TikTok is already American owned, and forget that all user data for every social media site is already globally available, and just stop and think about the propaganda angle. Thinking about it, first try not to be ashamed of paranoid American politicians.
From there, the simple truth is that censorship of information sources is what other countries not the U.S. do, or at least did. Nowadays it’s American politicians out to ban an app that can claim 170 million American users exactly because American politicians fear the people will once again be brainwashed, “turned,” or name your excuse for state action.
Back to Navratilova, she and millions of others who once suffered behind the Iron Curtain listened to VOA because the latter represented freedom and aspiration, only for a U.S. political class for whom true totalitarianism is perhaps too distant of a memory (if at all) to embrace the tactics of formerly communist countries. It makes you want to cry. Say it over and over again that this is what other countries do, not the U.S.
Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in yes, both Five Guys and VOA. It’s not just that food at the former is very good, it’s what anything associated with “America” represents to the rest of the world. In other words, it’s about freedom every bit as much as it is about food.
The beautiful truth is that the American brand is freedom, and it speaks to the power of VOA to this day. While thousands of South Koreans waited in line to try Five Guys, VOA can claim 361 million worldwide listeners. There’s your U.S. foreign policy, and there’s your answer to fears of TikTok as expressed by small-minded politicians and pundits. You’ve got the American brand and its 361 million worldwide users behind you, yet you’re afraid of an app?
Navratilova went on to tell Jenkins that VOA “gave us hope that one day we might have all of that to.” Which is a reminder that in banning TikTok while shutting down VOA, the American political class is harming itself and the U.S. at least two times, but surely more.
This article was originally published by RealClearMarkets and made available via RealClearWire.