To wonder if the anti-Americanism on MN is typical of the broader UK population?

[NCforthisonetwothree]

MN regular, NC for this. I’m an American, been in the UK for 10+ years. DH is also American, moved here for his work. Most of the posts I see that bring up the US are pretty down on it (and I agree! Trump, guns, healthcare, etc.) but there’s also a sort of strong general anti-American-ness, a sort of disdain, I’d say, for things (names, attitudes, behaviours, styles, etc.) that are “too American.”

We have two kids (born here) and both work full time and have integrated (reasonably well, I think?), but most of our friends are other expats and immigrants. I wonder whether the anti-American sentiment that seems fairly widespread here on MN is representative of most of the UK?

Posting here obviously as I don’t think anyone IRL would give me a straight answer.

@someonetookmyusername - I wonder if that is area specific? Everyone I know has Baby showers or Baby blessings. I'm in the South East.

I love the USA and Americans. Too tired to write anything else!

I don't like stupid, made up American names. There's just a different culture in England but I think that English people probably get a skewed view of American people by watching crap American talk shows on the telly.

Yes - I think Americans are viewed as brash and annoying and as not understanding irony.

Some people (older/my generation) get annoyed about American customs and sayings (e.g. halloween) coming in and squeezing out our culture. I imagine that younger people think Americanisms are cool though.

I lived in US for some years and went to school there for a bit but still, if I am honest, share some of these prejudices.

"annoyed about American customs and sayings (e.g. halloween) coming in and squeezing out our culture."

Halloween is NOT American (yelled every Scottish and Irish person on this thread.)

Well, once again: Halloween is not American in origin. Remember all that talk on this thread earlier about Scottish ancestry? That's where we Americans got Halloween (and from Ireland).

While I'm at it, we also got "high school" from Scotland.

Possibly it’s jealousy. I’m British, DH is American, and we live in the USA. DH has lived here all his life and I moved here to be with him 3 years ago. I love our life here. Mostly because I have such a wonderful DH who makes me so happy. I’m sure we’d be happy anywhere in the world.

My dad is currently visiting us with his girlfriend. She is so anti-American it’s almost comical. I asked her where this comes from and it turns out she believes a lot of propaganda about life here. In particular about healthcare, guns and taxation. I’ve told her to stop reading the Daily Mail and start listening to us who live here. I’ve sat down with her and gone through some figures re healthcare and shown her how much less tax we pay on our pay checks and even with the healthcare premiums and MOOPs added to my tax I still have a much higher take-home pay than someone in the UK on the same salary who’s paying tax and NI but has the NHS. And we don’t have waiting lists, can choose whichever GP we want, don’t have to share rooms in hospital, etc. And our health plan covers dental and vision too. The NHS doesn’t for most people. So there are a lot of misconceptions floating around.

That said, on my most recent visit to the UK last November I popped into Primark with my mum who wanted to get some bits and pieces. Without fail, every single t-shirt and sweatshirt in the men’s department had some reference to the US on it. People were buying shirts with place names and college names on that they’d never heard of or couldn’t place on a map. The mentality seemed to be “it’s American so it must be cool”.

I know many people on the UK who are insanely jealous that I live here. I think they must think it’s like the films.

I’ve very much enjoyed visiting parts of America and I don’t give a shit about baby showers and Halloween, however I have recently started working very closely with Americans and it’s not easy. It could be just my company I guess, but they simply cannot deal with the fact that other regions have employment laws, they act like it’s a terrible nuisance; I’m sick of having documents and presentations aimed at UK, European and APAC employees changed to American spellings and added clauses which are illegal in every other region except America. At once they seem incredibly insular and small minded whilst having an extraordinary degree of self confidence and arrogance.

But there are guns. Ordinary people have them. Healthcare is expensive! That is not the dailymail making that up....

Ithink ordinary uneducated american people make themselves look a bit foolish by seeming to believe that America is a better country than it is. It seems to allow its citizens to believe that it is unique in its democracy. There is less social mobility in america than in other developed countries due to the cost of 3rd level education.
Im not anti american but id rather be european.

"Possibly it’s jealousy"

People can dislike things without it always being jealousy.

I work with lots of Americans in another country so what on earth would I be jealous of? We have the same lifestyle and salary.

I largely enjoy their company but the cheese and over zealous optimism are draining for me.

That doesn't mean that I hate them. It just means we are different. And that's ok.

I know lots of wives like you who move abroad and develop a massive boner for their husband's country to the exclusion of their own though.

"It seems to allow its citizens to believe that it is unique in its democracy"

This.

I've met tons of Americans who think America is the free-est country in the world. You can't even go to school without risking being shot at. You can die from very curable cancers. Is that freedom? Really?

Honestly...I can only speak for myself.

I have mixed feelings about Americans. I have some great friends who are American and living/working here (some have returned to the US).

These are the Americans I think are I suppose more like me (once upon a time I would have said 'us' but Brexit has shown that's not true).

So reasonably liberal, self aware, usually Democrats and all that comes with that (anti-Trump, pro-gun control, etc).

I've also worked a fair amount with the 'other kind' of American. They are usually still based in the US and are brash, arrogant, ruthless, often though not always Republican, often climate change deniers, pro-Trump, etc.

IMO these people are arseholes. I don't find them culturally similar to me (again, a few years ago would have said 'us') at all and they haven't been very nice people at all. They'd sell their grandmother to make money.

So sometimes I might refer to Americans in a negative way but really it's short hand for 'the second type of American'. That hasn't impacted me taking each American individual as I find them and all of the ones I've met living here have been great.

I suspect it's somewhat self selecting as the second type of American would rarely choose to live elsewhere in my experience.

Sorry - very long answer to 'yes, I can sometimes be negative about Americans but I usually mean a particular section of American society and from your OP it's not the one that you are from'.

...oh, but also I've travelled in the US a lot and do think in some places the American public are much nicer than British.

I had a broken foot and was in a wheelchair in NYC and people couldn't have been more lovely - holding doors open, holding lifts, generally being really helpful, friendly and chatty.

The British public were rarely as helpful. Came home to do my shopping in Waitrose on crutches and was practically rammed out of the way by an older couple

Brit wife you are very naive. Healthy people who are not disabled and not pregnant pay less in healthcare. People use healthcare most in the first year of a child's life, towards the end of their life and if they are disabled. Across a lifetime British people pay much less for healthcare than Americans and have better health outcomes e.g. much lower natal mortality rates.

Not in my experience Op, I visit the States several times a year and have a lot of American friends. I don't think negativity towards America is generally common in the UK

I’ve always known my country isn’t the greatest, more because I’m a minority (whole different thread) and know no country is perfect, however it is highly annoying when people don’t have the decency to add a little word call “some” when speaking of Americans (or any country’s people for that matter).

Despite, everything going on now, I had a pretty decent childhood there, one spent in a quiet leafy green neighbourhood and riding my bike around and making sure I was home before dark. The kind that older people talk/complain about saying it doesn’t exist anymore. My husband is a Geordie and despite our cultural differences, we had quite similar childhoods and upbringing which surprise most due to the propaganda from both sides. He worried more about me visiting where he grew up than he did about mine. We both agree our countries despite their positives and negatives are quite similar in some respects.

The same way Brits talk about other Brits in different areas is similar to the way Americans talk about other Americans.

The North and South divide and ignoring other parts of the U.K., as well as stereotyping them, America does the same East Coast, West Coast, South.

I think often some Brits forget that the U.S. despite its size is a fairly young country compared to the countries of the U.K. and that it has a mix of many cultures from different parts of the world due to early settlements from European countries, battles between those countries and immigration. Our size has been changing from 1789-1959 when Hawaii became our 50th state. Our cultures differ by region just as the cultures from the countries of the U.K. and within those countries do.

If you only go by what you see on the telly without actually visiting, you are no different or better than the Americans that do the same.

Yes, there are some Americans that give us a bad name enough that people assume I’m Canadian and ask me a million questions when they find out I’m not. Not offensive, when even in the US, there is surprise I’m American by some Americans and visitors alike (again a different thread). The same could be easily said about some Brits.

I’ll admit though I’ve eye-rolled some Americans visiting here but they seem the type to be jerks regardless of where they are or from.

Halloween: the reason why in the UK (leastways outside Scotland and parts of NW England) it's seen as American is because it does indeed come from America.

Yes, it's Scottish etc in origin, but it didn't make its way into England from there, and its modern manifestation is not at all Scottish or Irish.

Halloween's manifestation in the US is still close to its Celtic roots in many ways: dressing in disguise, making jack o' lanterns (the shift to pumpkins from turnips in the US is because they are abundant and easier to carve), trick or treating is actually the way "guising" evolved in the US, having bonfires (mostly in the North, too hot for bonfires in the South even in late October), the preparation of special food.

The celebration has grown extensively in the US and has become commercialized like all other holidays but its modern iterations in the US still have strong elements of its Irish and Scottish origins and many Americans of Scottish and Irish descent, like my family, also use it as a way to connect our children to those roots by explaining those origins.

Halloween is pretty huge here in Scotland, Tom, and yes, in the American sense, too. TKMax Glasgow Argyll Street has some cracking deccies in for it now, West Coast folks . It didn't come from America, it was ours originally and it's always been quite a thing, especially here in the West. But hey, it's another chance for mostly English MNers to take another pot shot at America, so we can't let them down, can we now?

It was a big deal in Edinburgh, too, when I lived there many moons ago. In fact, I didn't realize that it wasn't a thing in most of England at that time because the Scottish celebrations were very close to what I had experienced in the US.

I used to live in Scotland and I remember the Halloween celebrations. By the way, I have an old book called "The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren" by Iona Opie (published in the 70s). The book says there is a Halloween line:

around the mouth of the Humber south-west to Knighton, and then southwards along the Welsh border, counting Monmouthshire in with Wales, and then - although this line is less certain - south again through Dorset

On the other side of the line is Bonfire Night, which is also the traditional celebration in Aus and NZ. I live in NZ, and Bonfire Night is still bigger, but Halloween is catching up, partly because fireworks have got louder and local authorities are more worried about fire risks than they used to be. All the effigy burning etc. has gone now.

In terms of the aspects you mentioned

"strong general anti-American-ness, a sort of disdain, I’d say, for things (names, attitudes, behaviours, styles, etc.)"

then I would say yes, that is fairly normal among the broader population.

I think it’s an uncanny valley type effect...

Because we share a language the expectation is there subconsciously that it’s the same culture - except it’s not, and it puts people on edge.

"I think it’s an uncanny valley type effect..."

You may be right. I work in Asia with loads of Americans and everyone expects that we will all be friends based on our shared culture but I actually relate more to the local people.

Americans are fine but there are a lot of things about their behaviour that I just don't get.

LucieFurr I'm afraid the Americans aren't the only ones with made up names...I mean, what is with the hyphenated names in the UK?! Effie-Mae, Lillie-Mai, Immie-Lou...these are actual names of kids that live around us!