Eurotrash

Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent

David Harsanyi

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780063066014
• eBook ISBN: 9780063066021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why should America try to be more like countries that are worse in nearly every way? 

Europe has been declining under the weight of its antiquated institutions, economic fatigue, moral anemia and cultural surrender. Yet American politicians, technocrats, academics, and pundits argue, with increasing popularity, that Americans should look across the Atlantic for solutions to the nation’s problems, including on issues like health care, the welfare state, immigration, and a bloated bureaucracy.

In Eurotrash, David Harsanyi argues we are looking in the wrong place. By every economic and societal measure, the United States is more tolerant than Europe. It is more welcoming of immigrants, but also far more successful at assimilating them. Minorities do far better in United States. Our economy is dominant. Only one European company appears in top 10 corporate powerhouses in the world and only seven in the top 50. Americans make up nearly half of the list.

Americans are far more charitable and happier than Europeans. Our slightly lower life expectancy and our slightly higher infant mortality rate are not a result of substandard care, but a statistical misunderstanding based on the fact we treat every life as one worth saving.

In this biting, fast-moving, and well-researched polemic, Harsanyi debunks prevailing notions about European supremacy and makes an unapologetic case for American exceptionalism, offering insight and reasoned arguments to counter current policy prescriptions.

1
Europeanization

After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe.

—P. J. O’Rourke

About three times as many Europeans leave their homelands and immigrate to the United States every year as the other way around.1 This fact shouldn’t 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 Europe’s faith and traditions continue to decay, a growing number of American elites—politicians, academics, pundits, journalists, among others—argue, 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 superiority—the unplanned and unregulated, individualistic, and seemingly disordered free markets—chafe 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.

It’s 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 Albania—even though many of those nations have adopted socialistic systems that Europhiles favor. Europhiles are predominately gushing about France, Germany, and Scandinavia. And that’s bad enough.

There are three fundamentally dishonest facets to the Europhiles’ arguments for European policy.

First, declarations about Europe’s 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 ago—and easily outpacing Europe on nearly all fronts.

Not that you’d 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 food—things that would ‘cause riots’ in Europe.”2 This oft-repeated mythology—from 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 care—is 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 elites—ensuring “free” health care for everyone or limiting “inequality”—Europhiles 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 don’t hear the full story.

Finally, Europhiles refuse to acknowledge that many of the European continent’s most notable genuine successes are achieved by embracing what we can now call American ideas. Europeans have long attempted to emulate the United States—from adopting “federalism” to deregulating certain industries and trade—to 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 Lazarus’s 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 Liberty—a sculpture of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty, gifted to America by the French in 1886—the poem was finally cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted in 1903.

Almost invariably, those quoting “The New Colossus” skip the line that immediately precedes it, which instructs those who enter, “‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she / With silent lips.” In other words: The United States wants you, but please leave the stifling customs and ideas of your old home at the door. From the beginning, the egalitarian American citizen carried with him a deep-seated and well-founded skepticism about European dogmas and norms.

This aversion was entrenched deeper in the national consciousness with every subsequent generation that fled the inequalities, indignities, and indigence of the European continent. The Monroe Doctrine, the principle laid out by President James Monroe to Congress in December 1823, is today largely remembered as an assertion of American hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, but also a stern warning to Europeans—the English and Russians, in particular, but it didn’t really matter who—to stay out of the neighborhood. The American instinct to tenaciously resist post-Enlightenment European ideological fads—many of which would evolve into homicidal movements—has served us well. Such an effort isn’t as easy as it sounds when we consider that the vast majority of newcomers for our first two centuries of existence had been Europeans.

There is good reason for our suspicion. Europeans might have come up with the foundational liberal ideals of the American project, but they’ve rarely been able to live by them themselves. Since 1776—nay, since perhaps the fall of Rome—the inhabitants of Europe have lived under the threat of poverty, monarchy, dictatorships, or war. Sometimes all three. It is only in the past seventy years or so, and only under the watchful eye of American power, that there has been anything resembling a lasting peace.

Only a year after Lazarus’s poem was written—two decades after the American Civil War began to correct our most egregious immorality—the major European powers were meeting in Berlin to figure out how to carve up the entire western half of the African continent. Europe itself had been violent and unstable for centuries. The conference was a couple of generations removed from 1848, the “Year of Revolutions,” where uprisings had once again swept through Europe—including a third French Revolution. The continent would spend a century revving up for two of the worst bloodletting orgies of the twentieth century. The ideologies of fascism and communism would dominate the mid-twentieth century. They not only would engulf their continent but would export deadly consequences across the globe. No wonder the huddled masses fled.

It’s also fair to say that contemporary American antagonism toward Europe had become something perfunctory, and quite often evolved into apathy. These days Americans don’t really know much about Europeans, which is why Europhiles often get away with misleading the public. Though Europeans might obsess over politics in the United States, we often forget Europe’s existence altogether—except perhaps when curtly reminded by another spasm of violence. More than 100,000 American casualties of war are buried in Europe, yet most Americans couldn’t tell you the difference between Brussels and Bucharest. When the European Union was formed as a direct competitor to U.S. economic supremacy, Gallup found that 77 percent of Americans admitted to knowing nothing about the organization.3

On the other hand, what Europeans think they understand about the United States—a cartoonish dystopian landscape in which relentless competition, destructive selfishness, repressed sexual mores, and unfettered violence rule the day—is absurd. Western Europeans have always enjoyed denigrating and grousing about American culture and power. Such irritation became most obviously trendy in the 1970s. The high art of poet Harold Pinter, who earned his fame belittling Americans, and the low art of punk rockers like the Clash—famously lamenting, “Yankee detectives are always on the TV, ’cause killers in America work seven days a week”—come to mind. Of course, like most pop artists of the past century, the Clash nicked, as they say, their music from the United States.

This attitude about Americans isn’t limited to the intellectuals or artists. When the Associated Press recently asked some random Europeans what they thought of when someone mentioned the United States, this is what some of them came up with:4

Capitalism. Money rules everything. Overweight people, Donald Trump, elections, shootings.

—Ingerlise Kristensen, sixty-eight, retired bank employee, Copenhagen, Denmark

America is food . . . fast food and (Coca) Cola. It’s cars. It’s the many electronics we have . . . the bridge in San Francisco.

—Ksenia Smertova, twenty-one, student, Moscow

Americans are American because they feel (they are) better than the rest of the world but in reality we are as good as they are. They simply don’t see us as their equal . . . but we are. Sometimes we are even better than them . . . but don’t tell them (laughing).

—Kenni Friis, twenty-eight, computer technology student, Copenhagen, Denmark

A black-and-white look at the world. They miss nuances.

—Knut Braaten, forty-three, handyman, Oslo, Norway

What Europeans don’t see is how America’s world domination in devising and manufacturing technological advances makes modernity possible. They don’t see the world-class university system and open markets that propel that dominance, or the widespread tolerance that allows hundreds, if not thousands, of people of all ethnicities to coexist in relative peace and enjoy the wealth.

Negative conceptions of America are not new. It is often said that World War II turned America into a global power. The truth is that the United States had been a world economic power for a century. The Europeans have been aping our technology, manufacturing, and economic ideas since the early 1800s, and yet disparage our culture. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, “from Europe’s perspective,” writes Richard...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1: Europeanization
• 2: The Nordic “Utopias”
• 3: Europe’s Health Care Disasters
• 4: “The United States of Europe”
• 5: America Is Far More Tolerant Than Europe
• 6: Imagine, No Countries
• 7: Richer Than You
• 8: The End of Faith
• 9: Thought Police
• 10: The Future Must Not Belong to Those Who Slander the Prophet
• 11: Europe as Retirement Home
• 12: The Sanctity of Life
• Can We Be Like Europe?
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher