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What follows is a very good essay in the Weekly Standard. Here a couple passages; however, the whole article is worth the time to read:
Europe Is No Model
As Europe is rocked by the Greek financial crisis, which seems likely to spread to additional European states, it may be worth asking why anyone would see in European politics a model for the United States. Yet this is exactly the position of America’s political left, which looks approvingly at Europe’s health care systems offering universal coverage. Now that Obamacare has been enacted, moreover, some progressive voices are already calling for a European-style Value Added Tax (VAT) to pay for it and the other ballooning entitlement programs run by Washington. The left continues to press America to look ever more like a European centrally administered social welfare state.
Most Americans—not just conservatives—are uneasy with the European model. This is not just a matter of national pride or misplaced chauvinism. There is something about the European model that most Americans distrust, though it is less easy to say exactly what that is. The reasons reach far back in the American story.
***
Europe is further down the course of self-created entitlements than the United States (though we have gained ground in the last 18 months). As ever new entitlements are provided, ever more taxes are levied; ever more taxes diminish the productivity and creativity of the people; the goals and ends of the populace become ever narrower, until finally even rearing a replacement generation is too great a burden, threatening people’s comfort; and ever more money is borrowed from ever fewer lenders. This is unsustainable, and the fact that it has not yet come to its unhappy conclusion is no reason to emulate it. European politics is a slow engine of self-destruction. The question is not whether, but when, it will collapse. And when it does, the result is likely to be a more rigid and meaner despotism than the soft despotism of today.
Tocqueville describes this problem eloquently:
“Only perceptive and clear-sighted men see the dangers with which equality threatens us, and they generally avoid pointing them out. They see that the troubles they fear are distant and console themselves that they will only fall on future generations, for which the present generation hardly cares. . . . The good things that freedom brings are seen only as time passes, and it is always easy to mistake the cause that brought them about. The advantages of equality are felt immediately, and it is daily apparent where they come from.”
The only corrective to a too great love of equality is a tempering dose of liberty, that is, a degree of prudence about what the central government should and should not do. The only corrective to bankruptcy short of centrally mandated rationing is restraint of the role of government. In all of this, America still seems a better model for Europe than vice versa.
***
There remains a very deep strain of America’s political culture that is fiercely independent. Our politics should continue to allow its expression. In many quarters there remains a rough and ready “Don’t tread on me” attitude. This is nothing to be ashamed of, or read out of our politics; it is to be defended, even gloried in. It is the very source of America’s ability to temper the powerful forces pushing toward government-mandated equality of condition. It is the basis for America’s long history of prudence in not asking the central government to do too much. And it is therefore also the basis on which we have preserved—at least up until the present moment—a degree of fiscal sanity.
So, too, with our celebration of diversity. The most rough-hewn American with a gun rack on his truck—and the congressman he sends to Washington—are more genuinely independent-minded than the most outré performer on Europe’s weirdest stage. When Europe encounters genuine ethnic, religious, or cultural diversity—the Turk in Germany, the Algerian Muslim in France, the Pakistani in London—it stumbles because it does not know how to permit diversity to flourish. It is in these encounters that Europe reverts to form and seeks to level differences under the power of the state. Where that fails, only marginalization is possible.
The political left in the United States seizes on one thread out of the complex American political fabric—equality—and emphasizes it to the exclusion of all else. The left displays scant concern about using the federal government to force equality of condition; it displays even less concern for prudence in what it asks the government to do; and of late it displays virtually no concern at all for fiscal responsibility and the welfare of future generations. It chafes under constitutional and procedural restrictions on its ability to advance its agenda. And it seeks to stifle the free expression of religious and dissenting views in the public square.
The American left has turned its back on the incomparably rich and sophisticated political tradition that has been bequeathed to us. The narrative of the left has this great tactical virtue: It is simple, even simple-minded, in its conception, lacking the slightest nuance. Perhaps this accounts for the left’s singularly empty rhetoric; beneath its ad hominem attacks, faux emoting, and tactical calculation, its intellectual architecture could not support a feather.
***
American exceptionalism is not, as the left caricatures it, some preemptive right to run the world. To the contrary, it is the practice of a politics that addresses fundamental problems in a specific way, namely, a way consistent with union, with a balance between liberty and equality expressed through limited government, and with a decent respect for diversity. If there is another nation that approaches the fundamental choices of politics in this rich way—as opposed to simple, majoritarian egalitarianism—I am unaware of it. President Obama expressed his true contempt for American exceptionalism when he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism—just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” A more shallow, cynical misunderstanding of American exceptionalism is hard to imagine.
American exceptionalism, rightly explained, can be the source of powerful policies that are consistent with America’s best traditions. Such policies can, and must, be developed so as to gain popular support if they are to be successful. Developing these policies is the pressing task before our most thoughtful leaders.
Most Americans—not just conservatives—are uneasy with the European model. This is not just a matter of national pride or misplaced chauvinism. There is something about the European model that most Americans distrust, though it is less easy to say exactly what that is. The reasons reach far back in the American story.
***
Europe is further down the course of self-created entitlements than the United States (though we have gained ground in the last 18 months). As ever new entitlements are provided, ever more taxes are levied; ever more taxes diminish the productivity and creativity of the people; the goals and ends of the populace become ever narrower, until finally even rearing a replacement generation is too great a burden, threatening people’s comfort; and ever more money is borrowed from ever fewer lenders. This is unsustainable, and the fact that it has not yet come to its unhappy conclusion is no reason to emulate it. European politics is a slow engine of self-destruction. The question is not whether, but when, it will collapse. And when it does, the result is likely to be a more rigid and meaner despotism than the soft despotism of today.
Tocqueville describes this problem eloquently:
“Only perceptive and clear-sighted men see the dangers with which equality threatens us, and they generally avoid pointing them out. They see that the troubles they fear are distant and console themselves that they will only fall on future generations, for which the present generation hardly cares. . . . The good things that freedom brings are seen only as time passes, and it is always easy to mistake the cause that brought them about. The advantages of equality are felt immediately, and it is daily apparent where they come from.”
The only corrective to a too great love of equality is a tempering dose of liberty, that is, a degree of prudence about what the central government should and should not do. The only corrective to bankruptcy short of centrally mandated rationing is restraint of the role of government. In all of this, America still seems a better model for Europe than vice versa.
***
There remains a very deep strain of America’s political culture that is fiercely independent. Our politics should continue to allow its expression. In many quarters there remains a rough and ready “Don’t tread on me” attitude. This is nothing to be ashamed of, or read out of our politics; it is to be defended, even gloried in. It is the very source of America’s ability to temper the powerful forces pushing toward government-mandated equality of condition. It is the basis for America’s long history of prudence in not asking the central government to do too much. And it is therefore also the basis on which we have preserved—at least up until the present moment—a degree of fiscal sanity.
So, too, with our celebration of diversity. The most rough-hewn American with a gun rack on his truck—and the congressman he sends to Washington—are more genuinely independent-minded than the most outré performer on Europe’s weirdest stage. When Europe encounters genuine ethnic, religious, or cultural diversity—the Turk in Germany, the Algerian Muslim in France, the Pakistani in London—it stumbles because it does not know how to permit diversity to flourish. It is in these encounters that Europe reverts to form and seeks to level differences under the power of the state. Where that fails, only marginalization is possible.
The political left in the United States seizes on one thread out of the complex American political fabric—equality—and emphasizes it to the exclusion of all else. The left displays scant concern about using the federal government to force equality of condition; it displays even less concern for prudence in what it asks the government to do; and of late it displays virtually no concern at all for fiscal responsibility and the welfare of future generations. It chafes under constitutional and procedural restrictions on its ability to advance its agenda. And it seeks to stifle the free expression of religious and dissenting views in the public square.
The American left has turned its back on the incomparably rich and sophisticated political tradition that has been bequeathed to us. The narrative of the left has this great tactical virtue: It is simple, even simple-minded, in its conception, lacking the slightest nuance. Perhaps this accounts for the left’s singularly empty rhetoric; beneath its ad hominem attacks, faux emoting, and tactical calculation, its intellectual architecture could not support a feather.
***
American exceptionalism is not, as the left caricatures it, some preemptive right to run the world. To the contrary, it is the practice of a politics that addresses fundamental problems in a specific way, namely, a way consistent with union, with a balance between liberty and equality expressed through limited government, and with a decent respect for diversity. If there is another nation that approaches the fundamental choices of politics in this rich way—as opposed to simple, majoritarian egalitarianism—I am unaware of it. President Obama expressed his true contempt for American exceptionalism when he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism—just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” A more shallow, cynical misunderstanding of American exceptionalism is hard to imagine.
American exceptionalism, rightly explained, can be the source of powerful policies that are consistent with America’s best traditions. Such policies can, and must, be developed so as to gain popular support if they are to be successful. Developing these policies is the pressing task before our most thoughtful leaders.
Europe Is No Model
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