Greg Poehler and Sweden's "Celebrity Culture" (or Lack of One)

Some years ago Amy Poehler's brother Greg offered some "big thinks" about the differences between Sweden and America. They did not strike me as brilliant. But it did strike me as interesting that he thought it worth noting that the Swedes had a different view of celebrities as not "better" than anybody else.

After all, there was a time when Americans were regarded as living in an egalitarian society compared to Old World Europe--when, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, hailing from a France where, if with a king still on the throne and the Old Regime die-hards still pretending they could turn the clock back to the days when "it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever" in their favor, it was becoming ever clearer to most that democracy was getting the upper hand.

By contrast it is now Americans like Greg who are surprised at the egalitarianism of Old World countries (even with their social democratic values in an advanced state of decay) compared to that of the New World U.S., so much so that they spell out, with surprise, that they don't think some people are "better" than everyone else.

This is not an insignificant change--and indeed says a lot about what has happened in an America where since at least the middle of the last century the spectrum of politics has run from a conservative "center" to a hard right, with the whole consistently edging rightwards over time. Indeed, the very words in which he expressed himself are telling, the Swedes (to his apparent surprise) thinking "nobody's better than anybody else." Just like the tendency to say that a person is "worth" the net value of their financial assets, that we so casually refer to people as "better" than others--not "better" at performing some particular task, or a "better" person morally, but all-around "better" by virtue of being higher up in a socioeconomic hierarchy, of how much money they have or who their parents were--bespeaks just how deeply rooted, and how unnoticed is that rooting, is the most traditionally inegalitarian view of the world in contemporary America.

For anyone remotely progressive in their politics, or even simply alert to the ideals of classical liberalism on which the United States was founded, awareness of that fact should prompt some hard thinking.