When I thought this was a silly, baseless question:

Q: Why are so many people biased against America?

This particular answer, though very long, was so well composed that it kept me reading. It's introspectional. It received 3.1k upvotes.

Here it goes:

A: I am utterly, completely, over-the-top astonished that the answers offered to date are missing the point. Including from people whose judgement I respect.

No it is not because of Trump. People outside of America slagged off the US in the Clinton years, and the Nixon years, and the Eisenhower years. The negative perception was cemented in the 60s, and everything since has been confirmation bias.

No it is not because of the clash in values between American individualism and libertarianism, and the rest of the West’s statism and collectivism. That’s a contributing factor among those with enough cultural affinity and exposure to get to know how the US ticks, which maybe explains some of the last decade or so, with the Internet. But again, the “Death to Amreeka” crowds, the sneering at the unsophisticated doughboys, the dismissal of American culture—all that predated that deep familiarity by decades. The discovery of the substantive cultural mismatches were again a late addition and confirmation bias.

No it’s not just American military adventurism, although that’s certainly a more long-standing factor in much of the world. (When my uncle welcomed me in Athens while I was living in California, he said, “So, nephew, you’re living in America, huh? … Americans, murderers of the nations.” The expression was proverbial in the Greek left. And since the Yugoslav Wars, the Greek right as well.)

The reason is that America was the first to have become a world hegemon mostly through soft power.

Hegemony means that the rest of the world is going to resent you, no matter what you do, because they cannot get away from hearing about you, and people don’t like someone else’s ideas and culture and politics and culture wars impinging on their own.

That’s why when people are outright bigoted and nasty towards Americans, they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. Because as far as they’re concerned, they’re punching up. Serves ’em right, they’re privileged anyway.

(Why yes. That rhetoric of privilege and punching up does work outside of America just as well as within it.)

The soft power means that they aren’t necessarily going to hate you outright: Americans did not bomb Britain out of an Empire, whatever they got up to in Vietnam or Iraq. But people know that you’re the 800kg gorilla, even if you constantly tell them that you are virtuous and noble. Which will make them all the more ready to pounce on you, when you inevitably fall short of your virtuous and noble rhetoric. That virtuous and noble rhetoric made the resentment inevitable.

People don’t expect better of an imperial Russia, or an imperial Britain, or an imperial France, or an imperial Germany. Some of them took on the garb of a Mission Civilisatrice, but I doubt people were really taken in by it anywhere. With the possible exception of Kipling.

But the States, prodded on by its own exceptionalist rhetoric, said they were different. That they were making the world Safe For Democracy. That they desired Liberty for All. And when the US acted as any imperial power must, and did some grubby things, there were a lot of outsiders who wanted to believe—and who felt betrayed. And they’ve held the kind of grudge against America and its optimistic, American Dream mass culture, that they did not hold against previous imperial powers.

You’re hearing it even now, in the tedious whataboutism from the Global South about Ukraine. People expect Putin’s Russia to elbow neighbours aside in pursuit of security. That’s what imperial Athens did to Melos. They don’t expect any better. But America? America said it was better. It still does, with its advocacy of human rights. That’s why the non-stop whataboutist refrain from them is that America is hypocritical.

The real tragedy here being, that America has been sincere in its naive, Wilsonian vision of a better world. They were, in fact, high on their own supply.

Hence a phrase little remarked on now, let alone Googlable, but very revealing. On the eve of the First Gulf War, the Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans made a speech defending the need to go to war to safeguard Kuwait as a sovereign state.

Evans could not help himself: he muttered the aside “some might say we’re seeking to make the world Safe for Feudalism.” Because he knew that this venture was not the Safe for Democracy mission that Wilson had in mind, and that stuck in his craw. It stuck in his craw, because he too wanted to believe that America had been making the world Safe for Democracy. But we loyally sent our troops in anyway, under the banner of the Treaty of Westphalia, not Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

That naive optimism was weaponised in American mass culture as a vehicle of hegemony, but it was no less sincerely articulated for it—and to a more cynical, war-weary audience outside of America, the response vacillated between admiration and irritation, depending on how attached the audience it was to its own culture, how susceptible to the siren call of Blue Jeans and Coke, how impoverished, and how insecure. (Insecure goes both ways in the response.)

I did expect a better read on America being the 800kg gorilla from Stephen Taylor's answer, but he did have an interesting insight:

I think a lot of the bias toward Americans also comes from our historical tendency to inflate the wonders of American life to oversized proportions out of sync with reality. Some of this comes from having been put down so frequently, a class-based psychological issue deep-rooted in American life, probably related to so many of us having come from poor immigrant families. We puff up the wonders of American life to compensate for having come from the bottom rungs of society in other countries. We’re not the only culture that does this.

You’re not, but you’re the culture with the megaphone. People are paying disproportionate attenion to your foibles. And when people discover that the streets of Hollywood are not paved with gold, they truly are crestfallen, to an extent they wouldn’t be with Moscow, or Paris. Just as they were crestfallen to discover that the States was just another empire after all.

And there is something… “gee willywickers” about the way Truth Justice and The American Way have been inflated in American mass culture, quite plausibly rooted in that class insecurity, that makes outside cultural elites (and the people that follow after them) reflexively sneer, once they realise the foundations are rotten. Hence the ludicrous notion that America has no high culture. These are disappointed suitors: they’re not going to console themselves over the emptiness of Scrooge McDuck by turning to Whitman.

EDIT: This answer has gone viral, and the quality of feedback has degraded with it. If I wanted to hear yet more introspectionless variants of “Americans, murderers of the nations”, or “Christ Jesus is coming”, or “How come everybody wants to move to the US of A, huh?”, I'd be on fucking YouTube.

Not something I make a habit of, but I'm closing comments.

[quora.com]