Cultural labels like ‘Americanism’ are reaction from socially displaced strata, not new order.

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. It is an unconscious attempt at reaction on the part of those who are impotent to rebuild and who are emphasising the negative aspects of the revolution. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1159

Categorization

• DEFINE: Elegant mechanism: what presents itself as a ‘new culture’ is actually the anxious self-defence of groups being crushed — an unconscious reaction, not a forward movement.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution and to how moral panics (like the Islamophobia readings later) often project onto a ‘new’ threat what is actually internal social displacement. — connects to: Anti-Semitic nationalism emerged from wartime 100 per cent Americanism. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1683