Politics & Power Quote by Todd Gitlin

Gitlin is poking a hole in the smug idea that America exports “fun” to a world of dour seriousness. The line works because it sounds like a concession to American exceptionalism (“Like Americans...”), then quietly flattens it: everyone is chasing the same psychic refund. “Emotional compensation” is the tell. Fun isn’t framed as leisure or pleasure, but as a payout for living under systems that demand constant measurement, productivity, and self-management. Entertainment becomes less a bonus than a coping technology.

The subtext is about modernity, not nationality. By pairing “utilitarianism and calculation” with “the rest of their lives,” Gitlin suggests a world where rationality has colonized the everyday: work, relationships, even identity become projects tracked for return on investment. In that environment, fun isn’t frivolous; it’s relief from being appraised and appraising yourself. The phrase also implies a kind of quiet desperation: if life is organized around usefulness, then feelings have to be smuggled back in through spectacle, pop culture, consumption, and mediated experience.

Contextually, Gitlin comes out of a tradition of media criticism that treated mass culture as both sedative and social glue. He’s attentive to how American-style entertainment travels globally not because the world is “Americanized” in some simple sense, but because the conditions that make distraction desirable - bureaucracy, market discipline, time pressure - are increasingly shared. The bite is that the world doesn’t want America; it wants the anesthetic America got good at selling.