Europeanization: America’s future?

last updated 8 January 2015

A diabolical foreign force is taking control of America, said Mark Steyn in National Review. I’m not kidding. President Obama and the Democrats have been in charge for just two months, but already, “full-scale Europeanization is under way.” With the U.S. mired in recession and citizens desperate for relief, Democrats see an opening for Big Government and they are seizing it. So we’re getting Europeanized health care; massive, Europeanized public-works projects; Europeanized climate-change policy; and Europeanized cradle-to-grave entitlements. Soon, you, too, could be living in a land where the state makes sure everyone winds up more or less equal, and assumes “every primary responsibility of adulthood,” taking care of your kids, your elderly parents, and you, even if you choose not to work.

Oh no! Might we also have to endure “excellent trains and universal preschool?” asked Dick Polman in The Philadelphia Inquirer. This notion that Obama is trying to “Europeanize” the USA is just silly. First of all, there are some features of European life that America would do well to emulate, considering that Europeans enjoy higher life expectancies and literacy rates than we do. But more to the point, Obama’s agenda “bears no resemblance to European social democracy.” He’s certainly not suggesting a 60 percent income tax rate for all, à la the Netherlands; he’s proposed returning to the same two top rates we had during the booming 1990s—36 percent and 39 percent. His health-care reforms leave the system in private hands. What’s really going on is that conservatives are desperately trying to demonize Obama, before he can enact his progressive reforms. “So here we go again with Eurobashing.”

Laugh off the threat if you like, said Charles Murray in The Washington Post, but I really do think the country’s liberal elites are enamored of Europe. What they don’t realize is that behind the beautiful architecture and the hedonistic daily lives in Stockholm, Rome, and Paris, is a modern aimlessness—a belief that people are nothing more than “a collection of chemicals” that will one day “deactivate,” so you might as well “while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.” Work in these societies is “a necessary evil,” not an opportunity for personal or social growth. Marriage, families, and religious faith are becoming irrelevant relics of the past. “The drift toward the European model can be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional—and why it is important that America remain exceptional.”