Well, a great chunk of Americans don't. And I'm pretty sure even a cursory glance around the Internet will prove that to be true.
But the idea that Americans are somehow philosophically squaring off with the social knights of Europe is an attractive one to some people who see politics as a great football match in which the other team is to be dehumanized, derided, spat upon and, ultimately, pummeled into submission. Go team!
Adults shouldn't think like that, but demogogues and power-mongers have been utilizing the Politics of Division for centuries. And their minions, unwitting all, are all over the Internet doing what they've been trained to do.
Once more into the breach!
Now, this may surprise you, but in fact, not every American thinks about Europe. It's a country of 320 000 000 with a multitude of different back grounds and attitudes--about EVERYTHING.
But if I had to describe the various attitudes of Americans to attitude I'd group them in these categories:
- Americans who don't care or think about Europe RARELY IF AT ALL. (Rougly about 60 percent of the populace.)
2. Americans who think Europe is a nice place to visit but....you know, just not for them..(about 20 percent)
3.Americans who think that Europe is a social utopia that has solved every problem ever presented by man where everybody gets up every morning singing in full-throated harmony to greet the sunrise and thank the Gods for their existence .(about 15 percent).
4.Americans who think that Europe is a COMMUNIST HELLHOLE.
What can I say? I'm tempted to say why dwell on any of their attitudes? Who cares what they think?
But that's because I'm American. And therefore I don't get why anyone would care.
And there you go: because this is where American and European contexts differ.
Europeans are outward looking.
Doesn't it make sense that Europeans would naturally look out at the world? A good deal of them live pretty close to a border. I think it would be a very rare European who hadn't visited another country where they speak a different language.
I live in the Czech Republic, about fifteen miles away from a foreign country. 23 years ago it was the same country. 100 years ago it was a province of a greater empire. Before that, in the Middle Ages, it was part of a different empire, the descendant of which ended up taking it over in 1938.
These countries touch each other, in history and today.
I own a company that provides services to Czech factories owned by Germans, by Americans, By French people, Austrian mega-corporations, English companies, and local companies, who buy and sell every single day from someone abroad.
Countries have a common history of wars and blood and trade and bread and friendship. They chafe up against each other, they give each other massages, they lend a hand, they give a sucker-punch.
They affect each other.
They notice the success of another country(in Europe and without) and they think 'hmm, maybe we should do things that way.'
They see where policies seem to have failed abroad and think, 'we are not going to make that mistake.'
Europeans think about Europe and they think about America; they think about Asia or Africa. They notice things.
And they should. Why on earth wouldn't they? That's how they've survived.
Americans are inward-looking.
Your business is your business, my business is my business. You do what you want, I'll do what you want.
WE crossed the ocean in a leaky boat so we could live out in the middle of nowhere and do whatever the hell we wanted and not worry about other people too much.
OK, in reality we were and are way more interconnected than that. But there's a certain mythos. The rugged indivualist, the pioneer, the boot-strapping muck-puller. Tough as nails and able to build a house with his nothing but an axe and some fingernails.
It is a myth and it pretty much always was a myth. But it's a myth that defines Americans.
We don't need the metric system. We have our own phonetic alphabet. Fahrenheit because it's more specific, inches and miles even though the Imperial system is stupid but we don't give a damn, our rugged individualism will take the more complicated system, thank you.
The downside is that we don't look so much at other countries, so we don't understand them. Ignorance is the price we pay for our myth of self-sufficiency.
Americans are dramatic
America has a lot of problems. Oh, some people will tell you we don't but everyone knows we do. And we broadcast those problems 24/7. To ourselves. And to the rest of the World.
Now, I live in Europe. Europe has some problems. But you know what Europe doesn't do? It doesn't broadcast it's problems to the whole world. I mean, the problems have to be pretty big before Americans even notice them, and then it's STILL an American source reporting on them.
But American problems are bigger, and you know what. Deep down, Americans like their problems.
Problems are dramatic. Problems are tragic. WE pit ourselves against the elements and we pit ourselves against each other and we pit each other against the bureaucracy and we go down swinging and then nurse our hurts, content that we've lived up to the hard-fisted pioneer that makes up a corner of our souls.
Americans are dramatic and define things dramatically. That's why political debate is so extreme. The other guy is either setting up death panels for the sick or he's forcing the poor to die a horrible death in the streets.
Ridiculous.
America was created. Other countries just happened
There's been a lot of talk about American exceptionalism in the last few years. Personally, I never heard the term when I was growing up. It's a new term. A trendy thing. Something that politicians say to get the flag-waver's going; something critics use as evidence of our overweening arrogance.
But I guess a lot of Americans believe in that; believe in the myth that we threw off the yoke of a despotic Europe centuries ago and forged our own hard-going but glorious path. There's a core belief in the 'American experiment' that defines America differently even from other democracies who developed differntly and less abruptly--or more recently.
Now all of the above is reinforced by propaganda. And propaganda in America is a very weird thing. Because it's not so much this:
because this doesn't work in an inward looking country. This is seen as campy and funny. Something nobody would fall for. I see old-school communist propaganda in Europe and it cracks me up! It's so obvious. That stuff would never work in the USA. If, indeed, it ever worked in Europe.
American propaganda looks like this:
This is what Americans are saturated in.
I can't stress enough how much the trivial and the substance-free dreams of materialism bombard Americans at nearly every second of the day.
It's not that one can't see REAL news; it's not like there's a 'Great FireWall of America' that the Government has erected.
It's just drowned out in the din of reality tv, infomercials, soap opera, celebrity news, sitcoms, crime dramas, mega-sports events, game shows, local news about newborn kittens stuck in a tree, and of course, the REAL news of big social problems: riots, protests, police killings, racism, mass shootings, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, automobile pile ups, the War on Terror, and so on.
So, you see if you take all these elements:
- ignorance born out of a mind-your-own business mentality which springs from a myth of the Holy Individual
- a sense of drama and strength-through-hardship outlook
- a ridiculous non-stop barrage of media images that focus the viewer on every aspect of human reality in the USA and nowhere else
- And then you add the fact that we have only two countries on our borders and those borders have been stable for a long, long, long time
- and that, as a country, we really are all-but-self-sufficient--we may import cheap crap from China but we don't have to
- and finally, a political culture whose polarization, drama and excesses are absolutely out of control
then American ignorance and American misconceptions about Europe and the rest of the world start to make a little more sense.
Hope that helps.
The funny thing is, that, even as Europe is NOT a 'Communist Hell-hole' neither is America the AynRand-ian bastion of free-market capitalism it pretends to be.
Both are mixed economies with welfare programs, free education, retirement funds, and even medical funds(limited to the old, disabled or ultra-poor in the USA, though).
Governments in Europe and the USA alike support their own corporations both openly and secretly, through grants and stipends, tax breaks and loopholes.
They have more in common than not. Even the corruption has the same smell.
But the politics of inclusion never go over quite as well as the politics of division.
