Important distinction, but not new!
Reader comment on item: Europe vs. America

Submitted by Alec Rawls (United States), Feb 1, 2003 at 22:25

The distinction between the bureaucratic leftism of Europe (traditionally called social democracy) and the limited government ethos on which the United States was founded is extremely important, but it is anything but new. It is the central division in Amercan politics since the New Deal, which (by expansive interpretation of the commerce and tax powers) threw out our system of limited enumerated government powers. (Because everything affects interstate commerce in some way, everything is now held to be empowered, an interpretation that was rejected pre-New-Deal precisely because it had that implication, in contradiction of the explicit system of limited enumerated powers.) With that barn door opened, the central conflict in American politics has been between those who want to adhere to our nation's original principles of liberty and limited government (Republicans) and those who reject liberal values (Democrats).

Government power itself gets thrown onto the scale, biasing the battle towards the statists. Because our nation has a history of limited government, we have had SOME success in trying to get control of this juggernaut (though government is still expanding as a share of GNP). Europeans, in contrast, for the most part never have had our restrictions on government power. As a result, they have been squashed by the steamroller. The socialists are ascendant and, with the weight of government having an institutional bias towards their side, Europe is doomed. It is a walking corpse. Islam will flood them and breed the descendants of liberal Christianity into the minority there, at which point they will become an Islamic state.

In America, the liberty haters seem to be slightly fewer than a majority. Thus of the "supersystems," belief in liberty has one half of America, which it holds onto by its fingernails, and is in a powerless minority almost everywhere else.

Yes, there are some distinctions to be made between alternative "super-systems." European social democracy has totalitarian hatred only for those who love liberty, while the Islamists and the Chinese communists have totalitarian hatred for everyone who isn't Islamist or communist respectively. From the point of liberty lovers, they all hate US.

Alec Rawls

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