And you know it don’t come easy
Political strategist Trygve Olson, a founding Lincoln Project advisor, launched a Substack days ago that I ran across just this morning. He offers some musings on the work of soft power that white nationalists like those propelling West Wing policies may never understand. His jumping off point is the “chaotic, over-the-top, and joyfully weird” Eurovision Song Contest.
The annual event watched by roughly 180 million viewers (over half the population of our disUnited States) knits together a continent of diverse languages and cultures. Not simply through music, although there’s that, but through participation:
Every year, nations from Iceland to Ukraine, from Portugal to Israel, show up. Not just to compete — but to belong. To stand on a shared stage and say, we are part of this. Even in moments of crisis — maybe especially then — the show goes on.
Americans like to think we invented community. That we’re the world’s example of pluralism and shared purpose. But the truth is, we’re often too proud, too isolated, or too caught up in our own culture wars to see what’s happening beyond our borders. Eurovision is a reminder that unity doesn’t have to look like conformity. That shared identity can emerge from wildly different voices singing side by side.
The event provides cross-cultural connection, as Olson sees it and “a subtle kind of politics.” It is also “a powerful form of soft power.”
One would think that Donald Trump, the former owner of the Miss Universe Organization, might grasp that. But no, he’s all about showmanship, money, and picking winners and losers. Sacrificing for the greater good and building community is for suckers.
“For decades, soft power was the beating heart of America’s global influence,” Olson writes. “Our culture, ideals, and optimism were tools of connection, not coercion. But in recent years, we’ve turned inward, obsessed with division and retreat.” This, while other nations wield soft power “not just with strategy, but with joy. With music. With unity.”
Okay, Olson oversells his thesis there, given that the decay of democracy on this side of the Atlantic has its European analog. But let’s continue.
Eurovision reminds us that cultural connection is still a weapon for good.
What’s striking — and tragic — is how figures like Trump, Musk, and their acolytes have failed to grasp what every American president since World War II understood: that this kind of cultural connection is not weakness, but strength. In his second term, Trump gutted USAID, undermined public diplomacy, and treated our alliances like transactions. He mocked the very Europeans who, through forums like Eurovision, are building the kind of cohesion and soft power America once led with. He sees them as weak — but they are, in fact, showing a kind of strength he and his MAGA enablers can’t comprehend. Because real strength isn’t about bluster. It’s about belonging. And right now, much of the world is pulling together while we posture and pull apart. It doesn’t conquer — it invites. It doesn’t impose — it inspires. And that might be the most important power of all in the world we’re living in now. The kind we could use more of — the kind that reminds people they’re seen, heard, and part of something bigger than themselves.
With our daily, lonely struggles to raise the kids and pay the monthly bills, that sense of belonging must be nurtured to be sustained. It doesn’t come naturally these days, save in the wake of natural disaster when all else is suspended.
An acquaintance noted recently how in the wake of Helene’s WNC devastation neighborhoods and complex dwellers came together to help one another. With food, with drinking water, with cleanup. And then, once the crisis subsided (we’re still in recovery; don’t think otherwise), people became strangers once again. With power and water restored, they went back inside their homes to their streaming services and narrowcast news. Into the siloed realities that sustain disunity and bitterness.
Disunity and bitterness is the soil autocrats till to grow dictatorship.
So, a small community event in the wake of disaster for you:
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Have you fought dictatorship today?
No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense