The new "anti-imperialist imperialism" coming out of the US was something I noticed first in bookshop displays. The kinds of politics sections in London bookshops where you'd have found Streeck and Verso titles filled up after 2016 with Obama memoirs and the Russiagate canon.

On a trip to Australia at the height of Russiagate, I was struck by one prominent CBD bookshop whose international politics section seemed to consist solely of Trump exposés, Michelle Obama's book, and what seemed like every single Russiagate conspiracy title then in print.

Obviously, Britain and Australia are tightly bound to the American military, economic, and political nexus, but what seemed remarkable was that the allegiance here was with a political party (rather than the US itself), and more remarkable still, the party then out of power.

And while the titles themselves were self-consciously "anti-" and "resisting" ones, they seemed to signal consent for an imposition of a particular set of American values, while completely driving any other form of political expression out of view (especially "local" politics).

This overt colonisation of "liberal left" headspace over the past 4 years is very evident in everyday conversation, where left-leaning people outside of the US now seem to construct their politics mainly out of secondhand fragments of American discourse.

Of course, there are corresponding developments on the right, where one notices right-leaning family members suddenly getting all their talking points from certain pro-Trump news sources. But the thing to note here is that the terms and vocabulary are similarly American.

So what happens now, when the party out of power (whose interests and viewpoints we were encouraged to identify with as expressions of "resistance" to authoritarian control) succeeds to the presidency?

My sense is that the US liberal dominance over all forms of thought and expression on the "left" outside the US will only worsen, as US ideologies around identity politics bed in and come to seem like second nature (especially within institutions).

The only thing I can see disrupting this is if the Biden administration becomes embroiled in an Iraq-style military debacle. Even then, though, I expect any resistance outside the US to take its "anti-imperialist" cues from within the US itself, thus reinforcing the pattern.

Ideas here stimulated by this post and thread: https://twitter.com/Alex__1789/status/1326487387896242177?s=20