Snow White, Trump’s Cultural Revolution and the USA’s Lost Soft Power
1938 was a fateful year in American cultural history. Three stories from that year link Snow White, cultural revolution and the USA’s soft power.
Snow White and the End of the Disney Century
Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first cel-animated feature in motion picture history, was released to spectacular success in 1938. Over the next nine decades the Disney corporation “nourished a genial cultural imperialism that magically overran the rest of the globe with the values, expectations, and goods of a prosperous middle-class United States.”1
In 1938 European leaders (including French diplomat, Alexis St. Leger who won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Literature) responded to Germany’s claim over the Sudetenland. They sought to prevent world war. US President Roosevelt stated it was “100% wrong” the U.S. would join a “stop-Hitler bloc”. America remained neutral and has ever since blamed Europe for appeasement. Meanwhile, American citizens succumbed to panic and mass delusion after Orson Welles's radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
In 1938 Pearl Buck became the third USA citizen in eight years to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her sentimental stories of China reflected her life as an American evangelical Christian missionary in China. The sentimental Swedes loved them. Ten years later revolutionary China threw Pearl out, never to return. She campaigned for the rest of her life in service of undemocratic Taiwan. Coincidentally the last German to win the Prize until 1972, Thomas Mann, also emigrated to the USA in 1938. The world’s ‘greatest living novelist’ joined a vast European émigré community that became the foundation of American high culture in the ‘American Century.’
Those three stories of 1938 lingered through the American Century. 2025 is shaping up as a less successful year in American cultural history.
The remake of Snow White has flopped. In contrast, a Chinese animated fantasy adventure film, adapted from Chinese mythology and a 16th-century novel, Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen Yanyi), was an astonishing success. Following its release, on the first day of the 2025 Chinese New Year, Ne Zha 2 blew the Disney film, trapped in its sentimental history, out of the water. Ne Zha 2 became globally the highest-grossing animated film and the highest-grossing non-English language film. It is the highest-grossing film of 2025 and the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time. It may climb further. Disneyland is soooo American twentieth-century.
Trumps’ Cultural Revolution
Meanwhile in Washington DC, the ship of fools sails on. Donald Trump inaugurated a new Golden Age, inspired by its nineteenth century frontier spirit. But his panicked critics see chaotic delusion. An idea is spreading that Donald Trump has unleashed a Cultural Revolution like the ‘ten years of chaos’ instigated by Mao Zedung in 1960s China. China, some USA liberal intellectuals think, has planted the seeds of revenge. For example, Orville Schell claims:
there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong. While Mao, who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection.
(Orville Schell, 2025)
CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria writes on the Trump university crackdown that:
as America appears to be copying the worst aspects of China’s recent history, China is copying the best aspects of America’s, striving to take the edge as the United States goes through its own cultural revolution.
(Fareed Zakaria, 2025)
It is an idea worth testing against history. Timely too. This is my final post of the World History Tour of World Powers, focussed on both the USA and culture. Next week I turn to China. Is Trump unleashing a Cultural Revolution in the USA?
Will it reduce America’s ‘soft power’ or its cultural influence as a ‘civilization state’?
Most importantly, how can you adapt if indeed world culture is becoming less American?
All those questions are answered for paid subscribers below the paywall.
