alt Hacker News> nobody should have been taking the US seriously maybe since Reagan. Finance, science and war were the only areas you could count on the US
That was plenty of reasons to take the country seriously! Also, the US has been the most powerful cultural exporter for a very long time. It’s still the case, whenever anything becomes huge in the US we get our local version in each European countries. Our far right parties are parroting American right politics, even copying the terminology as is
Have you seen the state of AAA gaming and blockbusters lately? Even music is being utterly destroyed by the streaming platforms and record labels greed, so yeah it might have been in the 80s up until the 2010s, but enshitification got the best of the US I'm afraid so not even culture anymore. It's just decacence.
It's not all US, but as you said things start in the US and trickles down across the rest of the world, so that's also true for its decadence.