Dominic Strinati, a leading critic in the theories of popular culture, puts forward two different theories of the Americanisation of Britain; these are the Elitist and Populist.
To begin with I will outline the elitist theory; although both theories suggest that the process of Americanisation has undoubtedly taken place, the elitist view condemns it. The elitist argues that the problem is the decline of British high cultures and the communities in which they were sustained, a decline claimed to be directly linked to the capitalistic influence of cultural and communication industries from America.
The populist argument takes a completely different perspective; it finds Americanisation to be highly rewarding for British society. Populists say ‘Americanism represents the true spirit of capitalism, ‘real capitalism’ (1992: p52) and that making money has become very profitable or that they enrich British social values and elite cultural values, if this is the case then Americanism can be used to criticise British traditionalism and its prior world dominance.
Both of these views can be criticised for taking a single viewpoint, even if they are at opposite ends of the cultural scale, the elitist from the top looking down and the populist from the bottom looking up. ‘These problems are compounded by the fact that it does not tell us how real audiences actually consume, understand and make use of popular culture’ (Allen 1990) the difficulty of defining Americanisation is again reiterated and the populist and elitist views cannot be proved.
The theory of Americanisation is often linked to that of mass culture, a consumer culture in which we as the public consume the products that America has to sell and it is seen as a threat to the Canon of great works and the rest of British society’s elite culture.
As Q.D. Leavis, for example, cites Edmund Gosse (1889):
‘One danger which I have long foreseen from the spread of the democratic sentiment, is that of the traditions of literary taste, the canons of literature, being reversed b popular vote. The revolution against taste, once begun, will lead us to irreparable chaos.’ (Leavis: 1932; p.190)
This quote agrees with the argument that Americanisation began pre-World War Two and is very clear in its anti-Americanism perspective.
The Leavises, Q.D. and her husband F.R. see the Americanisation of British culture as a ‘decline of culture’, that the high culture of traditional Britain has become standardized and trivialized at the hands of the mass media. In the pre-war years of the 1930s, the mass media was seen in the forefront of the emerging forms of commercial mass culture, through Hollywood cinema, ‘cheap’ American crime novels and pop music. This identified America as ‘the home of the mass revolt against literary taste’ (Strinati: 1995; p22-23)
The Americanisation of Britain has been a concern of many intellectuals over the last century; its predominance and therefore a strong argument of its influence on Britain came about with the end of the Second World War. This was due to the fact that America was the only nation to come out of the war in better economic shape than when it entered, Britain was in debt to America and had to continue its policy of rationing while it attempted to pay it back as a result of the threat from another superpower, the then Soviet Union.