Politics & Power Quote by Adam Michnik

Michnik’s line lands like a pin in a national myth: France, the self-appointed capital of taste, still behaves as if cultural prestige should function like an old reserve currency. The bite isn’t in the obvious claim that France is anxious about decline; it’s in the symmetry. Right and left, he argues, share the same vanity. That’s a classic dissident’s move: strip ideology down to the common reflex underneath it - status defense - and you expose how “culture” can become a bipartisan instrument of denial.

The caricature of Americans as “primitive cowboys or farmers” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s a complaint about anti-American stereotyping. Underneath, it’s a portrait of how empires of the mind preserve themselves: by downgrading the rival’s sophistication so the loss of dominance feels illegitimate. If Americans are philistines, then Hollywood’s reach, English’s spread, Silicon Valley’s soft power can be dismissed as brute force rather than attraction. The insult becomes a coping mechanism.

Context matters: Michnik comes from Poland’s democratic opposition, a figure shaped by life on the receiving end of great-power narratives. He knows how cultural superiority can mask political insecurity. In the post-Cold War era - and even more after the EU’s wobbles and America’s cultural export machine - France’s insistence on “exception” starts looking less like protection of art than protection of rank. Michnik isn’t pleading for American admiration; he’s warning that contempt is a lazy substitute for self-renewal, and that nostalgia, when shared across factions, hardens into policy.