Anticommunist liberals incessantly theorized against the creation of oppositions. If U.S. culture was to keep apt focus on the culture against which it should draw its own boundaries (communist culture in all its real and imagined manifestations, especially socialist realism), then American culture-makers would have to beware creating unnecessary oppositions within western culture. From T. R. Fyvel's "Reflections on Manifest Destiny," one had the sense that it was as important not to exascerbate opposition between the American and French cultures ("while Coca-Cola is being advertised all over France, the French wine industry will naturally join the French anti-American chorus") as it was to keep up the opposition between American and Soviet cultures. But here was the rub: the same argument had it that imposing Coca Cola on France--or exporting American anticommunist films even as "European film makers will regard [Hollywood] as the opposition"--entailed Americans' necessary acceptance of their role as world arbiters of culture. "Such facts may be unpleasant, but they are only aspects of the American imperial position, and as such not to be bemoaned, as some American observers tend to do, but to be studied, evaluated, and coped with--if possible." Thus liberal anticommunists were also, along with everything else, in the business of cultural studies. Yet these intellectuals were generally in this period working out arguments against the growing influence of American pop culture, fearing that very influence as indeed a sign of communism, not its opposite. The cultural studies project described by some anticommunist advocates of power of American pop culture as a stay against communist influence in Europe was never generally accepted as important enough to be given a theoretical base, thus it never got past this contradiction.

Only a month after Fyvel's piece appeared in The New Republic, David Daiches appeared there too, writing on "American Culture in Britain," lamenting not just that "chips" was giving way in London to "French fries" but, more distressingly, that a "debased kind of American culture" was "used so freely for export" and was being adopted by so many British youth--a "debased" culture rather than, Daiches points out, a cultural imposition purer and thus more tolerable: something rather from "Jefferson's America or Lincoln's America or Whitman's America or even Carl Sandburg's America." But, alas, these American "visions [are] wholly unknown" to the British kids lunching on French fries and taking American culture to entail "toughness, breeziness, cocksureness." Daiches's complaint obviously was that "Europe is gradually being reduced to a low colonial status vis-à-vis America," but he did not say whether the complaint would still be valid if the cultural invasion were being supported by the cultural manifestations of Jefferson or Lincoln or Whitman or Sandburg. His worry is that Americans might not be aware that they are being "misrepresented," and thus himself did not worry, apparently, whether a Jeffersonian or Whitmanian image would constitute a misrepresentation also.