American Exceptionalism
USA! USA! USA!
The Economist‘s Brussels bureau chief and Charlemagne columnist, Stanley Pignal, declares, “The thing about Europe: it’s the actual land of the free now.”
The thing about Europe, the sneerers say, is that it is over-regulated. Mounds of red tape and punitive taxes mean there are no trillion-dollar entrepreneurial ventures in France or Germany to match Amazon, Google or Tesla. But that is not all Europe is lacking. Also absent from the continent are the broligarchs who sit atop such behemoths, some of whom have a tighter grip on power than on reality. There are thus no European Rasputins pumping untold millions into political campaigns, getting pride of place at leaders’ inaugurations or their own new-minted government departments to run. There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation. That said, there are absolutely no tech executives boasting on social media of spending their weekends feeding bits of the state “into the wood chipper”.
The thing about Europe is that it is indecisive, too slow to act. Every crisis requires multiple summits of the European Union’s national leaders, often quibbling late into the night. The boring processes of rule by consensus can slow the EU to a crawl: it took four days and four nights of haggling to agree on the bloc’s latest seven-year budget, in 2020. Then again, the European state apparatus does not arbitrarily shut down every few years when political agreement over funding proves elusive, leaving millions of public employees on furlough and basic services unavailable for days or weeks. Consensus rule also means that the petulant policy tweets of one misguided politician—125% tariffs on China, anyone?—do not result in global stockmarkets being sent into a tailspin. The EU’s top brass are unelected and sometimes unaccountable. Still, they would not dare be photographed playing a round of golf after having wiped out the savings of millions of their compatriots.
The thing about Europe is it freeloads on defence, not spending enough on its armed forces to single-handedly fend off threats. This will continue to be true for a long time, even as defence budgets are hiked across most of the continent. But it also reflects a different understanding of what “defence” means. For one, nobody in Europe—outside Russia, at least—is even casually implying they will invade other countries. There is no Brussels quip about turning an unwilling neighbour into “our 28th state” (on the contrary, many of the EU’s neighbours are desperate to join the club). Nor do European vice-presidents fly uninvited to places they are seeking to annex, on the pretext that their spouse wants to watch a sledge race. Europe may have scrimped on intelligence-gathering, but its various leaders do know the identity of the aggressor who initiated the fighting in Ukraine (hint: it is not Ukraine). Many foresaw the pitfalls of invading Iraq a while back.
The thing about Europe is that it lacks an absolutist attachment to free speech. See how judges in Romania and France derailed the careers of hard-right politicians, who have convinced themselves (with little evidence) that it was their ideology rather than their lawbreaking that got them in trouble. Yet to many Europeans the idea that free expression is under threat seems odd. Europeans can say almost anything they want, both in theory and in practice. Europe’s universities never became hotbeds of speech-policing by one breed of culture warrior or the other. You can express a controversial view on any European campus (outside Hungary, at least) without fear of losing your tenure or your grant. No detention centres await foreign students who hold the wrong views on Gaza; news outfits are not sued for interviewing opposition politicians. Law firms are not compelled to kow-tow to presidents as penance for having worked for their political foes.
[…]
The thing about Europe is its economy is permanently stuck in the doldrums, a global cautionary tale. And no wonder. Europeans enjoy August off, retire in their prime and spend more time eating and socialising with their families than inhabitants of any other region. Oddly, surveys show people in countries both rich and poor value such leisure time; somehow Europeans managed to squeeze their employers into giving them more of it. Even as they were depressing GDP by wasting time playing with their kids, the denizens of Europe also managed to keep inequality relatively low while it ballooned elsewhere in the past 20 years. Nobody in Europe has spent the past week looking at their stock portfolio, wondering if they could still afford to send their kids to university. Europeans have no idea what “medical bankruptcy” is. Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
We’ve certainly endured periods of ridicule from across the Pond, but have always rebounded. But I’m not at all confident that we can recover from the self-inflicted damage this time.
Perhaps the Democrats may get to (partially) clean up another GOP mess. Their reward will be to be punished for the costs.
Rinse and repeat.
Europe has yet to learn to make aircraft with hidden features that crash the plane.
That was well done. For me it’s about the trade offs. Europeans and Americans make trade offs in what they value and what outcomes they want. You really cant have lots of leisure time and make lots of money, with rare exceptions. However, if you look at the Eu vs US pre-Trump I dont think the differences were quite so stark. With Trump I think it’s pretty clear that it’s clear that the character of the country has changed. You can argue about whether the people changing lead to Trump being in power or if it was the reverse, but prior to Trump I cant see Americans so avidly supporting Putin, cheering on tariffs and the harm done to our economy, supporting the idea then one non-elected guy, just because he was rich, would be allowed fire thousands without cause and reform the govt bypassing Congress or that people would actually laugh with glee about the people who are mistakenly being imprisoned and/or deported. It’s hard to believe a political figure could say that if you are just suspected of a crime you arent allowed to have due process.
Steve
And yet people ask me, ‘why would you want to move to Europe?’
I think this piece is sort of missing the point.
Sure, there is more than one way to skin a cat. And different approaches to life each have their own up and downsides.
And while it’s pretty much undeniably true that the US has just committed geopolitical suicide (which will bring severe and lasting economic consequences), it is also true that this wasn’t some inevitable necessity brought about by fundamental and unavoidable flaws in American culture.
We’re in this mess because some people worked very hard to get us there.
Sure, American voters collectively failed. But they didn’t fail without a multi-billion and multi-decade propaganda campaign, as well as the systematic dismantling of (initially) successful regulations.
Citizens United, for instance, wasn’t exactly the result of a grassroots campaign that represented the true and heartfelt desires of Middle America.
We’re here because a bunch of elites ultimately couldn’t control the monster (i.e., the modern-day GOP) they created – or perhaps didn’t want to anymore because they started believing their own bullshit.
(Which isn’t to say that individual voters aren’t responsible for their choices, but the thing is that propaganda works, as history repeatedly illustrates.)
@drj:
I have to respectfully disagree.
1) We are a superstitious people, much more religious than any European country, and our forms of religion are much more primitive.
2) We are a materialistic and greedy people. When Gordon Gekko said, ‘Greed is good,’ Americans nodded along.
3) We are a violent people. We have more guns than humans.
4) We are an ignorant people. Ask a random American about events even in our own history. Or our own geography. Or anything STEM. Or anything at all, really. We celebrate ignorance and despise intelligence.
Superstition opens the mind to nonsense and lies. Materialism strips life down to a single goal: more. Violence makes us callous. Ignorance makes us close-minded and incapable of refuting the lies we are fed.
There’s a Fox News or version of same in just about every country – many owned by Rupert Murdoch. And yet they have no Trump. This rolling disaster is absolutely a result of American culture.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m curious: who asks you that? In my circle of friends and family, the question is increasingly becoming – hmm, could we actually do that?
Edit: and for one friend, she just got her work visa in France. It’s happening
Most Americans are not hipsters, tech-bros, academics, or gentrifying woke liberals. They aren’t anything. They are far removed from what’s happening in reality and what happens to them is either family stuff or what is fed to them in the media. The communities are strange and alienated, and are at best decent and at worst predatorial, run by fundie Christians and small-time scam artists. The men, mostly, have no idea what found them a wife, and so they say anything to their sons about girls or life, which creates this whole anxiety about men falling behind. For good reason, they fear that they are a number in a system which no longer has any use for them.
Deep down, most of these people know that the version of America they allegedly crave sucks, that the factory jobs were not great, that getting rid of immigrants or trans people will not solve any of their problems. But they come from places where no one has ever stood up for anything. Like if your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents all just did nothing but go along, what are you going to do differently?
@drj: The first thing a budding autocrat must do is take control of the courts. The Federalist Society was astroturfed into existence 42 years ago to become the key element in the subversion of the judiciary. Their original goal was to remove barriers to money in politics. Each crack allowed in more money, facilitating the next crack. We now have basically no barriers. And with dark money, neither accounting nor accountability.
I’ll add that Jane Mayer’s Dark Money should be required reading and that Europe is not immune, money drove Brexit.
@Modulo Myself: I had a very frustrating conversation with a family member recently, and it was clear that all they knew about tariffs was what they saw on FNC. “What’s wrong with a level playing field?” they asked. “Sounds good to me.”
I asked them if they knew that tariffs with EU were already in the single digits and already essentially reciprocal. I noted that we already had the USMCA (aka NAFTA). They didn’t know. They were just going on what they heard on the “news” and that “we had the best economy when Trump was in office before.”
Sigh.
@Michael Reynolds:
A lot of the things you mention (greed, violence, stupidity) aren’t uniquely American.
Well, guns, of course. But fifty years ago people didn’t own home arsenals. That’s a quite recent development.
However, if there is one thing that sets Americans apart from other people it is the belief in American exceptionalism. “Bad things won’t happen here.” And if bad things do happen here, they happen to those people, not to us.
It makes people lazy and complacent, in the sense that politics isn’t that important,* so we can elect actors and pro-wrestlers to governorships, and entertainers to the presidency.
Europeans have the benefit of having lost world wars, their colonial empires, suffered conquest, and having come much, much closer to social revolution. It sharpens the mind.
* ETA: And bending the knee not that consequential.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I happened to see a board game store near me. I did had not been aware of its existence. Google led me to their Facebook page. They had recently explained their response to the tariffs. One person kept arguing with everyone in the comments by trumpeting the admin’s claims.
People kept trying to explain, via links, explanations of comparative advantage, etc. it did not matter. Dude just kept on keeping on, or what he imagines that phrase means.
The eternal hope: child will learn that a glowing stove burner is hot from a verbal warning.
The imagined worse case scenario: child sustains an injury that will heal, but the pain imparts a couple valuable lessons.
The actual worse case scenario: the orange glow is too much for the child to resist.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Well, from a certain standpoint, they have a point: why would anybody do something as dumb as Trump as doing? It’s a great question. Their answer happens to be denial. He’s not doing anything dumb.
Certain lies–we found WMDs in Iraq, Saddam was behind 9/11, and climate change is a hoax–created a machine which equates freedom with the right to lie and be lied to, and nobody responsible on the right tried to stop the machine.
@Modulo Myself: The idea of a rational basis for Trump’s policy is a contradiction of terms. Trump has surrounded himself with corrupt grifters. Some of them are also idiots. But some aren’t. But they are all grifters to some degree. My guess is that Trump is personally profiting from the presidency bigly, maybe a couple hundred million a month. God knows how much his buy stocks tweet netted him. He and his people have the ultimate grift going. Fuck policy or long-term goals, they don’t have any. Trump does things on a whim, and everything is done on a “what will help me the most” basis. Some is to rev up the base, which all about who they hate, some is how can I line my pockets, some of it is to satisfy his personal need for revenge. For him there is no element about what is best for the country. Never. And the same goes for almost all the Senate and House Republicans. The US has no allies. We may have strategic partners, but even that is problematic, since Trump lies. All the time.
Dumb policy might be what is best for Trump. He truly is a savant in terms of somehow understanding what will best benefit him.
@Modulo Myself:
Anybody would who is as stupid as the rapist.
@Lucysfootball:
Rational and rationalizing are two different things. Something may not be rational, but it can be rationalized. Trump voters rationalize Trump, and they live in a media environment where that equals Trump being rational.
@drj:
This is an important point. Add to it that we are exceptionally good at self-mythologizing. (Thank you, Hollywood). But this goes hand in hand with my point about American ignorance. We are the only nation that came out of WW2 richer and better fed than we went in, and yet we think we won it all by ourselves. And that it began on December 7, 1941. Compared to what Poland endured we were kids on spring break.
We deride the French as surrender monkeys, but the French were shattered by WW1, a conflict that we arrived at very late and to which we contributed very little. And the French had won far more wars than we ever did. We still have never had a general to touch Napoleon.
Americans somehow believe that we don’t use our power for conquest, despite what we did to Native Americans, Mexicans and Hawaiians, and tried to do to Filipinos, Cubans and pretty much everyone in Central America.
And despite our myths, we have lost wars. We would have lost the War of Independence had France not saved our asses. We lost the War of 1812. We lost Vietnam. We lost Afghanistan.
Americans also have no concept of how lucky we’ve been with our geography. Two oceans, each with an abundance of fantastic natural harbors, the world’s greatest watershed (the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio), staggering amounts of arable land, incredible mineral wealth, inland waterways up and down the Carolinas, on and on. Look at what Japan has accomplished with none of that. We’d have had to be complete nitwits to fail with all that we had to start with.
We are the nepo babies of history.
@Michael Reynolds:
I don’t recall where I heard a phrase more or less like: he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
Let’s recognize Trump’s real achievements. Shower head pressure! We are liberated from weak shower heads! Last week will go down in history not as stock market turmoil but as cleanliness triumphant.
@drj:
@Michael Reynolds:
In my short time here in the UK there’s a lot I find frustrating and, let’s say crappy, although that’s overly pejorative and mostly because of my extreme anger and depression. A friend (in a way more pejorative sense) described it as the “land of no service and polite ‘I’m so sorry'”. It seems like in a lot of ways you will get x amount of work and absolutely no more. “I failed to give you all the information and things broke? so sorry, you should have asked better and I can’t help you.” Or like I’ve emailed my property manager a couple of small questions 4 days ago that would have taken all of 30 seconds to answer and I’m not expecting an answer ever (I go nuclear tomorrow). It’s like the British revel in frustration for frustration’s sake and making everything frustrating for no purpose. Again, I remind everyone, I am extremely angry and depressed and that’s coloring things for me, but I suspect I’m not entirely wrong.
All that being said, having lived here for a little over a month know I am struck by the sense that something was taken from us as Americans. We could have at a lot of the good here, but that wouldn’t make some assholes an obscene amount of money. My EE cellphone plan is roughly better than my Verizon plan was and is $45 cheaper for the first year and $30 for the next year. The trains run frequently and don’t smell like piss. There are people out everywhere just existing with people. There’s a beer garden thing like 500 ft away from my flat that is full friday through sunday of people and no one’s being shitty to each other. The mall is full and vibrant.
In many ways it feels is like we could have had the good here and were on the way to it, but some rich assholes figured out they could be richer if we didn’t actually deal with our racism and history, if we treated Mexicans and Mexico better, if we didn’t turn Jesus in to a scam to enrich some white men and to keep women down and out. We could have had actual health care, rights, community, and we could have all had more money. Except that would mean people couldn’t be billionaires or even centimillionaires and that was unacceptable.
I think that’s what I’m most pissed about. I want to be home, with my people, in my house, but that was all taken from us.
@Beth:
No dispute there.
@Beth:
I understand that you are grieving, but at some point the UK (or wherever) has to be home. Mentally as well as in reality.
I think I can speak from experience here.
@Kathy: Anne Richards used it in a speech to describe George H. W. Bush.
@drj: @Beth:
I’m at the opposite end of that spectrum – no place ever feels like home, and I wouldn’t want it to. I have hated living in more states and cities than most people will ever visit. In Florida alone I hated
Niceville, West Palm Beach, Orlando and Sarasota.* With a partial for Tallahassee because my wife got sick on book tour so I had to fly out there for a week. The common thread may be humidity.
Most normal people are not suited for a peripatetic life. Our own kids are putting down roots. Possibly because we dragged them through Minneapolis, Evanston, Chapel Hill x2, Tuscany, Irvine x2, Marin County x2, before they left (fled?) home. (Extra credit for our youngest: Tongling, China).
Now we’re pretty sure we’ll be spending most of a year in London as a scouting outpost for a longer-term European stay in Portugal, Spain or France. Possibly Greece. To both of us a permanent home is a frightening prospect smelling of death. But most people, probably north of 90%, would find our lifestyle disorienting and alienating.
*That’s Niceville x2 and Sarasota x2.
To my mind, what a revolution entails is a bunch of destruction, and then rebuilding of something new on the rubble.
It might be that the people in power right now are going to do a lot of that destruction themselves. Having done that, I wonder whether people will want to trust them with the rebuilding.
I feel like the things we are saying here are things that would connect with many voters, who do feel as though they have been shortchanged and that the system is rigged. The system has been rigged, by the people currently in power. And they are rigging it even harder as we speak.
To me, this is the message. Some people get it, some people don’t. Some people understand it, but struggle to convey it in a way that connects with the average voter.
Yeah, all hail Europe!
They’d never break up a major trade deal. Except for the UK. And they’re not religious extremists. Except for France. They’d never follow a right-wing leader. (Ahem.) They wouldn’t follow one now. Except for Hungary and Italy. They’d never trash their economy in debt, except for Spain, Italy, and Greece, they’d never threaten their neighbors except for Turkey, they’d never shut down their governments except for Belgium, no mass killings except for Norway and France, no political unrest except for all of them…
@Fortune: Yeah, I’m sure it’s really breaking the Europeans’ hearts that shitty little internet trolls think they suck.
@SC_Birdflyte:
Thanks. I’d never have guessed that
@Fortune:
Unlike you, I suspect, I’ve not only visited all those named European countries, numerous times, I’ve lived in three of them. And you don’t know what you’re talking about. You sound like an ignorant hick.
@Fortune:
You know what I can do in Europe that I can’t do in the US? Not worry about some asshole shooting me. I can get – even as a foreigner not in the system – much more affordable health care. I can sit at a café table for an hour without feeling the glare of a pressured waiter. The people I encounter will as a rule know ten times more than the average American about the world. (See: Yourself.)
I can walk to places worth walking to, I’m not eternally trapped in a car, and if I am, I’m almost certainly on a much superior freeway. And amazingly, you can actually use the public transportation! It works.
The food is better. The wine is cheaper. Many, many, many times the number of outstanding, gorgeous cities. Where’s our Paris? Or Lisbon? Or Florence? Or Nice? And it’s not just the cities. Look at the English or French or Italian countrysides. Compare the class of a French seaside town to its squalid American equivalent. Or Santorini, FFS. There is more beauty on tiny little Santorini than in every American beachfront combined.
If all you care about is making money, then it’s USA! USA! But if you care about anything else, literally anything else, yes even internet speeds, France, or Spain, or Portugal, or even Italy, are the better countries.
And say what you will about European politicians, a mixed bag, but not one is a felon, not one is a rapist.
@Michael Reynolds:
He isn’t ignorant, he’s a liar and a bullshitter.
This isn’t even about Europe, it’s about deflecting criticism away from the Trump regime. “Those guys aren’t perfect either, therefore there is nothing seriously wrong with Trump’s adventures in policy land.” That’s it. That’s his “logic.”
And he can’t even make that non-sequitur argument without lying through his teeth.
The UK didn’t start a trade war with the entire world.
The religious extremists in France aren’t dictating government policy.
Neither Meloni or Orbán are openly using fascist language.
None of these countries deliberately undermined their own currencies and ability to loan money.
Turkey isn’t even part of Europe.
Belgium is regularly ruled by caretaker governments. That doesn’t mean in the slightest that their government shuts down.
Just compare the murder rates.
Of course, nothing even close to J6.
Let alone that any European country is doing all that shit at once.
In short: it’s all stupid, transparent lies so that the orange menace doesn’t look like as evil and incompetent as he is.
@Beth:
You might enjoy this. David Mitchell justifying bad British service to Stephen Fry.
Shit, wrong link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9PSg0sQyfs
@drj:
Come now! They are not a Trump supporter!
And BTW: good catch on Belgium. Anyone who thinks that the inability of a coalition to form a government thinks it is the same as our government shutdowns underscores they do not know what they are taking about.
I will say that Orban is a blight on the EU’s democratic quality.
I’ve seen a lot of hatred of Europe among libertarian/objectivist/right wing nuts.
One reason for it, I’m sure, is that Europe does a lot of things they have labeled as socialism, and by and large they work
@Michael Reynolds:
Yeah, even my recently departed father – a very conservative guy, who generally thought that just about everything American was better – liked that about Europe.
I remember my last trip to Vienna, my wife and I were at a very busy Greek restaurant/cafe, and after about an hour we asked a waiter for our check. The owner- manager then strode to our table and said that we did not have to leave, that we are guests, please do not feel rushed, you may stay longer and enjoy your time here. I told him that unfortunately we must leave as we have an early flight to San Francisco to catch in the morning. He then had a staff person bring dessert and coffee to our table – with his compliments.
Now, I know this was a bit unusual, but it is entirely to the point you were making. I’ve felt the same whether I’m in Paris, Prague, Budapest, Nice, Rome or Florence. In a myriad of seemingly small ways Europe has so many lifestyle advantages.
@drj:
Reminds me of Putin and his usage of the worst of the USA as examples why democracies are bad too..
@Steven L. Taylor:
This is a category error. Even if Fortune knew (which he very well might), he would still lie and obfuscate.
Unlike intellectually honest people, his political preferences – i.e., dictatorship, because that’s what supporting Trump means nowadays – do not follow from an (imperfect) understanding of reality. Rather, reality is deliberately and shamelessly distorted so that his political preferences might still make sense.
So that’s what he does.
@wr: I thought you of all people would carefully consider my points.