I'm not saying it's bad or good. But I wish we have less Hollywood, less Netflix, less american music, less american videogames, less imported american culture topics etc when actual local music, movies, books, games exist.
I'm not saying it's bad or good. But I wish we have less Hollywood, less Netflix, less american music, less american videogames, less imported american culture topics etc when actual local music, movies, books, games exist.
I would argue that the US (and perhaps some other English-speaking countries) need more cultural diversity imported from other parts of the world.
Many Americans are unaware because they have not traveled outside of the US nor have they studied other languages, cultures, music, etc.
The Internet and the growth of global media has helped, but it's not the same as going to another place and meeting the people there.
Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants have shaped a lot of our urban culture. Before Irish and German immigration exploded, the US was a whisky country, then it switched to beer. Germans introduced social institutions like kindergarten and fraternal societies that included the working classes (which eventually evolved into things like the American Legion) and of course workers’ unions. The three cultures greatly changed the religious makeup of the US from one dominated by British Protestantism to a pluralistic mix of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The US is the primary home of the world’s Jewish people (we have more Jewish people than Israel and the rest of the world combined, if you include mixed/secular Jews), and Jewish immigrants kickstarted the US’ involvement in industries like international banking and some kinds of manufacturing. Plus Jewish people have been hugely important in making US tertiary education and research some of the best in the world. Before these three groups immigrated, the US was agrarian and pretty homogenous, and these groups pushed the US towards cultural pluralism and assimilation.
In the modern day, Asian and Hispanic immigration are mixing things up too. I don’t have statistics but anecdotally I think Asian women are much more likely than other women to pursue careers in STEM, which has done a lot to make formerly male dominated jobs more gender inclusive. Spanish is basically a de facto co-official language in many areas. Americans outside these cultures are beginning to adopt multigenerational living (also because of cost of living) which is likely influenced by both of these. In almost all Asian countries, savings habits are very different than the default in the US, and I think you can see the effects of this in US areas with high numbers of Asian immigrants in things like property prices or a focus on value (like stores with lower margins and less marketing).
Basically none of these groups have been large enough to subsume American culture, but they’ve all contributed pieces on top of the base of Anglo Protestantism and culturally/actually genocided West Africans. And the sheer number of disparate immigrant groups have made the US the pluralistic society it is today, which is likely a big factor into why American culture easily exports to the rest of the world.
It’s a high bar to put capitalism (plus an obsolete concept and handwavy other things) as what immigrants need to overturn to have been considered influential to US culture, since in a lot of cases that is precisely what brings them to the country to begin with, and is like the main thing the US is known for.