The Other American Exceptionalism
Gerard Alexander
The Claremont Institute
Fall 2005
"
.... Blah blah blah "
http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/fall2005/alexander.html These views have not been dislodged, even by serious economic problems. And Europe's economic problems are serious. The unemployment rate is stuck at around 10% in Germany and France, and if anything this underestimates the true figure--even more unemployment is concealed through extensive job-training and early-retirement schemes. The fact that many continental European economies have such mechanisms for sidelining less-skilled workers makes it all the more striking that labor productivity still generally grows faster in the United States. For decades, France and Germany had narrowed the gap in labor productivity with the U.S., but in the past 15 years their progress slowed and then reversed.
Germany's unemployment is because of
1) merging with East Germany
2) loosing all control of monetary policy when they went with the Euro
3) immigration from former Soviet states & mediterranean - of which they are on the front line and have been for a long time.
The Causes of Declining Unemployment in Germany: Can the Schroder Government Take Credit?
...Snip
The central conclusions are that demographic & exchange rate developments, which are out of immediate hands of policymakers, have been the primary forces driving the German Unemployment rate
....Snip"
http://www.aicgs.org/research/germany2000/silvia.pdfWHICH IS IT! Neocons.. WHICH IS IT!
European stereotypes hold that American conservatives, under increasing evangelical influence, want morality to be systematically legislated. Actually, American evangelicals spend far more time shaping behavior in the private or civil sphere than through government. They teach personal values like family responsibility, clean living, self-discipline, voluntarism, and moral clarity in the face of wrongdoing. This ambitious project of private-sector character shaping is virtually without counterpart among purely secular Americans. And it is almost nonexistent in Europe, at least beyond the state-sponsored project of inculcating anti-racism, multiculturalism, and laicism as among the highest virtues.
Which part of this includes anti-gayness? Does gayness fall under "clean living"? Do you have to hate to clean live?
Such transatlantic differences can be highly consequential politically. Within a nation, major parties generally craft their platforms and rhetoric to attract the "median voter," that is, the hypothetical voter at the exact center of the political spectrum, whose swing can determine the election. In most European countries, the median voter is both less religious and more dependent on government than the median voter in the United States. This tugs American politics to the right and European politics to the left.
Three Quarters of the Americas (the whole continent)share Europe's values. Especially all the rich American countries outside the US. The ones with the strongest democracies. Why would Europe jump on the neocon bandwagon when nobody - across the sea has?
The perception that Europe is uniformly center-to-center-left is further reinforced by the fact that public expression is monopolized by a collusive journalistic, intellectual, and Eurocratic elite whose "arrogance almost beyond belief," in the words of William Kristol. Its ideologically lopsided political and intellectual elite is so potent that it may shape Europe's political identity as much as secularism and economic dependence do. Mainstream European press coverage of America, free markets, and robust conservatism is so routinely paranoid and hyperbolic that it makes Howard Dean look temperate.
Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! An idea on america - created by Kristol's daddy and not by the grass roots - and now shoved down everyone's throat as if it is a groundswell ... not openly accepted by intelligencia? WHAT ARROGANCE! WHAT PROJECTION!
In Western Europe as a whole, prospects for a "values" revival remain hazy. But another change might help generate daddy-party beliefs: further economic liberalization, which would not only improve the region's economy (cutting unemployment, for example) but, by creating more competitive markets, might spread hard values, at least concerning business. How could liberalization be promoted? Much economic reform is held back by Europeans' fears of the economic unknown, specifically that markets cannot provide at reasonable cost the services and insurance coverage that their governments currently offer (in return for high taxes).
D'ya think that Western Europe's Values are not based on Judao-Christian ones? Apparently not. It is all so hazy. Help me! Help me! It is hazy and I cannot see!
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