Americanism is a panic reaction of doomed old strata, not a real culture

Evidence

The elements of a “new culture” and “new way of life” which are being spread around under the American label, are still just tentative feelers. They are not due to a new “order” deriving from a new basis, because that has not yet been formed, but are due to the superficial apish initiative of elements which are beginning to feel themselves socially displaced by the operation (still destructive and dissolutive) of the new basis in the course of formation. What is today called “Americanism” is to a large extent an advance criticism of old strata which will in fact be crushed by any eventual new order and which are already in the grips of a wave of social panic, dissolution and despair. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1159

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci redefines ‘Americanism’ as the neurotic self-defense of displacement-threatened elites, not as an actual new civilization.
• XREF: This anticipates Gramsci’s fuller ‘Americanism and Fordism’ notes on rationalization, and parallels how later exclusionary ideologies get misread as new cultures rather than defenses.