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The last gasp of the europoor
For years, I've been treated to a steady diet of smug elitism coming from effete liberal Europeans laughing at obese, gun-toting and bible-thumpin' Americans. This reached its crescendo during the George W. Bush administration, took a lull during the Obama years and was resurrected after Trump took office.
The American was an ignoramus, a loud-mouth, a religious fundamentalist and irreversibly stupid. Hopelessly inferior to us sophisticated and cosmopolitan Europeans. Did you know half of Americans don't even own a passport? Most don't even know a second language!? Ha! And don't get me started on their healthcare, their gun crime and all other sorts of social pathologies. America, you see, is a third world nation masquerading as a first world one.
But as the years went by, these smirks felt increasingly hollow. The economic distance - and with it, standard of living - between the two major partners is growing wider by the day. A young French econ professor at Wharton lays out the bad news over just how deluded his fellow Europeans are on this question. Prominent FT columnists have noted the same.
Yet, perhaps there is still time to save the last shreds of honor for us poor Europeans. For one, the gap in PPP terms doesn't seem to be changing much. Europe has been behind for a long time. In terms of total GDP, the situation is much the same. Another aspect is that Europeans tend to work fewer hours.
While some of these arguments may have some validity, they all feel like desperate excuses. I for one am very much happy to see the insufferable elitism of Europeans slowly being wiped off our collective smug faces. The uncouth and primitive barbarian across the ocean turned out to be smarter and harder-working all along.
Perhaps this can also lead to a more pro-capitalist liberalism in the US. For much of my upbringing, liberal Americans were typified by folks such as Michael Moore and his obsessive admiration of the European welfare state. Colbert's snark about the embarrassing Red State American always felt like an underhanded way to gain favor with declassé elites across the ocean. Ann Coulter's observation that liberal elites in the US loved soccer because it is European surely hit closer to home than many in the media were willing to admit.
Of course, there is still some amount of liberal American simping left in the bag. This is perhaps most obvious whenever there are discussions on urban policy and the words "walkable city" invariably comes up. (To be clear, I actually think Europe gets this part better than the US).
Outside of an increasingly narrowing set of areas where Europe still outperforms, we are slowly witnessing a reshuffling of the deck. The old illusions are slowly coming undone and reddit-tier arguments about the US being a third world hellhole are convincing fewer by the day. At long last, after years of insufferable and unjustified smug elitism, the europoor is finally unmasked as the sham living on a lie that he always was. And I couldn't be happier.
Going off of your point about urbanism, what has always galled me is how much more beautiful European cities and frankly people are compared to their American counterparts, knowing the difference in wealth. Some of the few things Europe has left going for it (in purely material and aesthetic terms, of course people have an attachment to their own culture/language/etc.) are gothic cathedrals and a lack of visible homeless drug adicts or morbidly obese people walking around in public spaces.
It's pathetic that the richest country in human history can't close the gap on these things when you consider how far ahead the US is by any other measure. We could build our own Vienna or Paris if we wanted to, but all we can manage is Las Vegas and Disney World. When it comes to small towns and rural areas, the only place where the manmade environment hasn't depressed me has been New England (crossing from Massachusetts into upstate New York and seeing the contrast in what the small towns look like feels like crossing the iron curtain into some post-industrial wasteland).
On pretty much any other topic I will happily argue against liberals who romanticize Europe, especially when they're immigrants ("If you think Denmark is so much better then why did you choose to move here?"), but I have no counter on this one.
Old European cities have their own problems. Visiting Florence, I was struck by how little greenery there was on the streets. Yes, the city is old but it's also mostly just narrow cobblestone streets. One nice thing about having had your city ruined during WWII is that it gives ample space to redesign streets in a way that living in an openair museum doesn't, because there is little resistance to demolishing some shabby commiebloc.
Many of these older Italian and Spanish cities also allow cars on these narrow streets, which is less than pleasant. The solution ought to be to limit cars, but that would also require better public transportation and you can't really do much given the narrow width of these streets. Cities which grew big in later periods (e.g. Copenhagen) don't have the same problem as these old Italian cities do, given that during the 1800s the idea of boulevards became popular and even non-boulevard streets became wider.
It's also worth noting that just adding bicycle lanes isn't the only issue, planting new trees and adding greenery requires space too. That's why many Eastern European cities have added a huge number of bicycle tracks and general greenery in their inner cities in recent years, but you don't get the same activity in old Italian or Spanish cities because of these inherent limitations. As a result, they may be pretty at first blush but often feel sterile.
US cities are absurdly car-centric, yes, but generally speaking it is much easier to remake a street that is too wide than too narrow. Once buildings, especially old buildings, are built it is very hard to reshape a city due to "historical preservation" NIMBY:ism. Removing a few lanes is trivial by comparison. So while progress is slow in the US, the potential for fast improvement is there.
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Oddly enough, I had the opposite experience when crossing from Connecticut into New York about ten years ago. While New England is nice, the whole thing (lower New England at least, Vermont, etc. is different) feels kind of fake. If I drive to a small town in a rural area, I want it to feel like a small town in a rural area and not a hip part of Pittsburgh (my hometown) transported to the mountains for the benefit of urban emigres. Most of Western Massachusetts and Connecticut is like this. Stately farmhouses with plaques bearing the date of construction and grounds so well-maintained they couldn't have seen any real agriculture for decades. The whole thing broke down when I was in the northwestern corner of Connecticut and I stopped to get breakfast. I had hiked off the AT that morning and was looking for a nice greasy diner and I didn't care how much I paid. The town was handsome and I asked a man on the street if there was a place to get breakfast; he said there was a place right across from where I was and I thanked him and headed there. On my way in I noticed a bookstore near the parking lot that I planned to check out afterwards. I ordered eggs Florentine for 12 bucks, pricey but I wasn't complaining, and was not given the Hollandaise-sauce extravaganza I was expecting but a couple of coddled eggs and a few pieces of baguette. I wasn't anywhere close to full. As I went to check out the bookstore I saw the sign more clearly and noticed that it was a rare bookstore "open by appointment or by chance". There's something off-putting about a small, rural town where one can buy a rare book but can't buy a can of baked beans. As soon as I crossed into New York the whole scene changed and the towns had real businesses like hardware stores and banks and transmission places and the farms smelled like cow shit and it felt like a place people actually lived and not some glorified resort.
That's the trouble when you're making your living from tourism, everything gets turned into the service of "what will attract tourists?" "what kind of unique selling experience can we provide?" and of course "how high can we hike the prices to milk the tourists?". You price out the locals or they are all part of providing the services to the tourists and summer visitors. We get it in Ireland, too.
Any locals probably drive twenty miles to the town with the big box stores and that doesn't depend on tourists in order to buy their tins of beans or a good greasy filling fast-food meal.
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That's sad to hear. I didn't get to spend much time on the ground as I was passing through, so I could have been mistaken, but it seemed like an encouraging sight compared to the parts of the rust belt that I'm more familiar with. I imagine the most picturesque places will always end up as overpriced tourist traps given the economic incentives, but I'd love it if we could raise the bar enough so that everyone had something nice to look at. Basically, more Americana aesthetics and fewer unremarkable strip malls.
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