Europeanization
After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe.
P. J. ORourke
About three times as many Europeans leave their homelands and immigrate to the United States every year as the other way around. This fact shouldnt surprise anyone. Europe, still one of the wealthiest places on the planet, has begun collapsing under the weight of its top-heavy institutions, economic fatigue, moral anemia, and cultural capitulation. The modern legacy of Europe is one of unregulated and destructive mass migration, overregulated and constrictive economic life, high unemployment, a lack of entrepreneurship, eroding civic society, low replacement rates, creeping authoritarianism, and most devastatingly, a loss of faith in their best ideas.
Yet, even as Europes faith and traditions continue to decay, a growing number of American elitespoliticians, academics, pundits, journalists, among othersargue, with increasing popularity, that we should look across the Atlantic for solutions to our most pressing problems. These Europhiles prefer modern European institutions, ethics, and policies to the ones found here. They sneer at the jejune and vulgar nature of American life. They see America as a place teeming with uneducated, obese, gun-toting, television-obsessed, box-store-shopping, slack-jawed yokels who are in desperate need of paternalistic guidance. For them, a Europeanized population is an enlightened, educated, and selfless one, willing to sacrifice for their conception of the common good. They are antagonistic toward the societal characteristics embedded in the American psyche that work against the success of contemporary European ideas: our embrace of risk taking, individual liberty, and traditional Judeo-Christian ideas.
Indeed, the most vociferous champions of the European systems of governance in the United States are invariably the most passionate critics of the dynamism and glorious messiness of American life. The factors that propel our economic superioritythe unplanned and unregulated, individualistic, and seemingly disordered free marketschafe against their technocratic sensibilities. Europhiles detest individualism and self-sufficiency and definitely the unfettered self-assuredness of their average fellow countrymen. For them, American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States occupies a unique position in world history, is ugly and plainly wrong.
Its not just American leftists who look to Europe for answers. While a large part of the European temptation emanates from the political left, which values centralized control over individual choice, American nationalists and theocratic intellectuals are also increasingly looking toward places like Hungary, Russia, and other Eastern European nations for answers on how to stem the diminishing birth rates, dramatically dropping church attendance, and what they see as our moral decline. This book, however, is predominately concerned with the destructive love affair left-wing Americans have with Western Europe and member states of the European Union. When Europhiles admiringly gaze across the Atlantic, they are not jealous of the political structures of Turkey, Bulgaria, or Albaniaeven though many of those nations have adopted socialistic systems that Europhiles favor. Europhiles are predominately gushing about France, Germany, and Scandinavia. And thats bad enough.
There are three fundamentally dishonest facets to the Europhiles arguments for European policy.
First, declarations about Europes superiority are often wildly overstated. The temptation to portray Europe as a utopia is given traction by a stream of deceptive activism from journalists and intellectuals, who not only overstate European triumphs but denigrate American ones. Europhilic arguments for adopting European norms and policies are most often predicated on the idea that our own country is in steep economic and moral decline, even though, by every quantifiable measure, Americans are living healthier, wealthier, and freer lives today than they were forty or twenty years agoand easily outpacing Europe on nearly all fronts.
Not that youd know that from the mainstream reporting on Europe. In a recent New York Times piece headlined How Europeans See America, readers learn that European governments prioritize citizen welfare, offering national assurances like universal health care and affordable education. Americans have grown accustomed to the exorbitant costs of basic human services, the absence of parental leave protection and the unregulated presence of chemicals in foodthings that would cause riots in Europe. This oft-repeated mythologyfrom the notion that greedy Americans allow chemicals to kill off their countrymen to the idea that they pay exorbitant costs for basic human services to the lie that we live with subpar medical careis debunked when the data is analyzed with honesty.
Though we must concede that the Times is right about riots. Europeans riot over nearly everything.
Second, while Europeans are quite good at numerous ventures that are highly valued by American elitesensuring free health care for everyone or limiting inequalityEurophiles refuse to acknowledge the trade-offs that accompany these successes. They either ignore or dismiss the tremendous economic downsides that European societies take on when implementing social welfare programs. They either ignore or dismiss the numerous core freedoms, both individual and communal, that are lost when living under the bureaucratic thumb of a monolithic enterprise like the European Union. They either ignore or dismiss the negative externalities that accompany mass immigration without assimilation, one-size-fits-all energy policy, or socialized medicine. This book will explore those trade-offs, and many other instances in which we often dont hear the full story.
Finally, Europhiles refuse to acknowledge that many of the European continents most notable genuine successes are achieved by embracing what we can now call American ideas. Europeans have long attempted to emulate the United Statesfrom adopting federalism to deregulating certain industries and tradeto fix their problems. Most good ideas head from west to east, not the other way around.
Disdain for Europeans has been something of an American rite. The very creation of the United States, after all, was a rejection of Europe. Nearly every American is acquainted with the inspirational lines from Emma Lazaruss grandiose The New Colossus. They should be. Give me your tired, your poor... is a beautiful rhetorical affirmation of our promise to immigrants who, like my own parents, came to the United States to escape, variously, the strictures, ethnic violence, monarchism, religious oppression, wars, feudalism, ancient hatreds, fascism, class-driven injustices, communism, or economic immobility of the Old World. Written by Lazarus in 1883 to help raise funds for the pedestal below the Statue of Libertya sculpture of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty, gifted to America by the French in 1886the poem was finally cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted in 1903.
