A bit more about "soft power" (trying to write more of this in my own threads rather than more annoyingly in someone elses): it's a new concept, starting in the US in 1985 and popularized by the late 80s. This is a really significant time and place!
tl/dr: It's a neoliberal concept that was always about treating the remains of ideological competition as if they would continue once the competition was over.
The US, as an empire, was in competition with another world empire, the USSR. Both of these had a lot of power and client states after their joint victory in WW II. Both were, unusually for empires, highly identified with particular world ideologies, so imperial competition was ideological competition.
The story that the US tells itself was that the Civil Rights Movement won its victory because it appealed to our better natures. This is false.
The Civil Rights Movement won what it won because the US treatment of Black people was flatly contradictory to what the US said our ideology was. It was a constant thread in USSR propaganda and an effective one, given that everywhere else in the world could see how our ideals were bullshit that we didn't believe.
That's why the leaders of the US grudgingly agreed to make whatever progress we made.
So what was happening by 1985 and generally the late 80s? That's right, the USSR was disappearing. Even before its fall, it was clear that it was failing and that its people did not believe in the ideology.
So the supposed progress we had made could start to be reversed now that we weren't required to make it. An ongoing process that continues now.
The concept of soft power says that we didn't become an empire through military and economic might and the willingness to sponsor coups and death squads. It instead says that our empire depends on people thinking that we're great.
This is propaganda designed to appeal to people in the imperial core. Straight-up mystification of what makes an empire.
It also treats a historical phenomenon, US internal and external actions taken as weapons against an ideological competitor, as if it's an eternal one. As if we were always going to keep going with these things once the imperial need for them was past.
As with all neoliberalism, it depended on achievements of a past era of liberalism while doing nothing to maintain them.
Read Roman Empire propaganda, British Empire propaganda, or any other peak empire's stuff for which records survive and you'll read a lot about how people admired and respected them. This tends to be the record from the victors that survives. So later historians always include some people who take this seriously.
But it's never been true. It's always a story by the empire's storytellers, for the people of the empire.
/fin
I agree with the superstructural analysis on how policy inconsistency with ideology enabled oppositional propaganda, and that the collapse of the USSR removed geopolitical counterhegemonic pressure, but I'm not sure that it's fully explanatory. It does somewhat deny the impact (and therefore prescriptively, agency) of civil rights, anti-war and union campaigners in mobilising to exert political pressures, or investigative reporters delivering uncomfortable truths that move the needle significantly, like Watergate.
Also, in the period immediately after the fall of the USSR, there were substantial pressures arising from the anti-capitalist, climate change and anti-globalisation movements, as well as a new ideology of "self-determination" deployed to support the economic liberalisation of former communist states, to which some pantomime of consistency had to attach. The rupture of 9/11 (imo) was what enabled the transition in ideology to ethnonationalist supremacy (though America First was yet to slouch to birth), the end of rhetorical fundamental rights based protection (selectively, under exigent circumstances designed to loosen via the Patriot Act and the creation of DHS) and the War on Terror, conducted in a deeply socially repressive psychological climate where dissent was traitorous in principle.
1/
I don't think it's a gradual thing. From this point, the Overton window had been so fully shifted in terms of accountability for power and equal human worth that the path to institutional fascism was all but locked, though movements like Occupy, BLM, Me too and others fought (I think successfully) for the popular ideological ground, while WIkileaks and other new media continued to expose abuses of power. The firewall around the new national myth (brilliantly exposed by the movie Team America) was impervious, by neo-neo alliance and institutional design.
Counterfactually, you could say well if the USSR had still been there, the US would have had to contend with their propaganda but there was now the internet, 24hr news and mobile comms; hypocrisy was exposed time and again, as with Iraq WMD, Wikileaks and many more.
In sum, the ideology of the empire changed; values became subordinate to strength and difference became a source of fear rather than curiosity; those who would oppose were cowed and in that moment the old civic nationalism of the US were gone and "soft power" (always an iron fist in a velvet glove) was unveiled to reveal the steel, both domestically and abroad.
A big enough carrot is also a stick, yo.
/2
I don't mean to deny the agency of the Civil Rights Movement and others. If they hadn't effectively made domestic problems within the empire impossible to ignore, then the propaganda from the USSR wouldn't have had any purchase, and the leaders of the US could have ignored it.
I was in various of the post-1991 movements. Sure, people tried various things, and they were worth trying. I don't think they had lasting success.
I think normatively and in terms of collective experience and praxis, they did; Occupy would never have been without anti WTO protests, for example. Comparable and downstream actions outside the imperial core led to changes in governments in many countries in Latin America, and a corresponding reduction in the ability of the US to exert influence. You could even draw a direct line from the landless people's movement in Brazil and its participation in Seattle to Lula's presidency.
I thought that the thread was implicitly about the US context. I agree that some non-US movements were effective. None of the US ones turned out to be.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Simon Brooke
anilmc