Politics & Power Quote by Wyndham Lewis

American advertising doesn’t just sell products here; it sells the grammar of belief. Wyndham Lewis aims at a particular modern vice: the superlative as a solvent. When every soap is "miraculous" and every car is "the greatest", language stops sorting the world and starts inflating it. His complaint isn’t prudish etiquette about exaggeration; it’s about a cultural feedback loop where the vocabulary of appraisal becomes permanently overheated. Once the top shelf is crowded with "ultimate" and "unprecedented", there’s no rung left for actual excellence to stand on.

Lewis is writing as an early-20th-century modernist watching American mass culture export itself as a style of attention: louder, faster, allergic to nuance. "After the American manner" is a jab with geopolitical bite. It suggests advertising is not merely a market technique but an imperial habit, a way of colonizing everyday perception. The subtext is anxious and elitist, yes, but also diagnostically sharp: when value is constantly shouted, the public’s capacity to discriminate gets dulled. You don’t just buy more; you feel less, because everything is pitched at maximum intensity.

"No standard of value whatever is intact" is hyperbole deployed against hyperbole, a neat irony. He’s using the very weapon he condemns, underscoring how contagious the superlative has become. The line anticipates our current "best ever" culture, where metrics, ratings, and hype blur into one continuous marketing weather system, and judgment becomes a mood rather than a measure.