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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.
But you miss the point here: it's not about GDP numbers, or even general economic strength. More generally, Euro-elitists smugly enjoy a sense of superiority over things like crime, urbanism, healthcare, which isn't really directly related to GDP growth, and more about systemic factors directly rooted in US life—not easily gotten rid of with a bigger economy.
Also, insufferable? Maybe, but Americans often exhibit similarly chauvinistic behaviors too... bashing western Europeans over their cowardice and pacifism is a pretty popular trope, especially virulently in the 2000s hysteria over Iraq ('Freedom fries' and posters like "Now Iraq; Then France": there was a lot of butthurt back then)
And that's to say nothing of criticism of other, often poorer nations...
Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism. That's the preferred way to explain disproportionate shares of black criminality in society. Hence the implication that white Americans are in effect partly to blame for this state of affairs due to their past and present sins.
It's not even elitism that's intelligent, which would be arguing that the US should police violent people more harshly without regard to race, so it comes across as fairly meaningless. Europe's lower crime rates are an accident of history (few imported slaves) rather than an inherently superior system.
So my contention is that even in areas where there are reasons for Europeans to be objectively smug over Americans, the way it's done is often incoherent and displays ignorance of the root causes of US dysfunction, such as crime in this instance.
As for healthcare, that is partially about income too. While I am no expert on healthcare, I think the meme that a large proportion of Americans are just one paycheck away from medically-induce bankruptcy has been disproven countless times yet it keeps resurrecting itself. I'm not sold on the idea that Europeans have better healthcare than Americans. If you look at the amount of innovation in the US healthcare system, nowhere in Europe does there seem to be any equivalent. Perhaps only Switzerland comes close in per capita.
You do know that American white homicide rates are sky-high by European standards?
Not really. Lithuania is nearly twice the level of white Americans. US white numbers are above the EU median but nothing unheard of, and certainly not "sky high".
Isn’t Lithuania’s murder rate an outlier in the EU? I agree that sky-high might be a bit of an exaggeration, but US white homicide rates would be shocking in most of Europe.
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