Posted on 06/01/2005 9:23:50 PM PDT by neverdem
Forgive me for making a blunt and obvious point, but events in Western Europe are slowly discrediting large swaths of American liberalism.
Most of the policy ideas advocated by American liberals have already been enacted in Europe: generous welfare measures, ample labor protections, highly progressive tax rates, single-payer health care systems, zoning restrictions to limit big retailers, and cradle-to-grave middle-class subsidies supporting everything from child care to pension security. And yet far from thriving, continental Europe has endured a lost decade of relative decline.
Western Europeans seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence. Election results, whether in North Rhine-Westphalia or across France and the Netherlands, reveal electorates who have lost faith in their leaders, who are anxious about declining quality of life, who feel extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign competition - from the Chinese, the Americans, the Turks, even the Polish plumbers.
Anybody who has lived in Europe knows how delicious European life can be. But it is not the absolute standard of living that determines a people's morale, but the momentum. It is happier to live in a poor country that is moving forward - where expectations are high - than it is to live in an affluent country that is looking back.
Right now, Europeans seem to look to the future with more fear than hope. As Anatole Kaletsky noted in The Times of London, in continental Europe "unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 percent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 percent only once in those 14 years."
The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it's sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Europe is way beyond declining. It is dying, and because of the very social liberalism that the nitwit Brooks extols.
Social liberalism is the deadliest of poisons.
Please show me some examples.
ping
From further on in the article.
Thank you! Brooks sounds like real liberal, right? /sarcasm
Europe has been in an economic decline. It seems by the recent voting in various European countries that decline is about to change!
Are you asking me to critique this excerpt? I would've excerpted:
"Western Europeans seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence. Election results, whether in North Rhine-Westphalia or across France and the Netherlands, reveal electorates who have lost faith in their leaders, who are anxious about declining quality of life, who feel extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign competition - from the Chinese, the Americans, the Turks, even the Polish plumbers.
Anybody who has lived in Europe knows how delicious European life can be. But it is not the absolute standard of living that determines a people's morale, but the momentum. It is happier to live in a poor country that is moving forward - where expectations are high - than it is to live in an affluent country that is looking back.
Right now, Europeans seem to look to the future with more fear than hope. As Anatole Kaletsky noted in The Times of London, in continental Europe "unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 percent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 percent only once in those 14 years."
The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it's sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas."
The first two paragraphs are typical of self-conscious mainstream media writers -- apologizing for how humble and self-effacing they are. Just get out of the way. Beginning where I have, it becomes a totally coherent short piece -- without telling us more about the author than we want to know. What's his point?
Otherwise, typical New York Times columnists drone on and on in the manner of the first two paragraphs endlessly, playing hide and seek with the only two-five paragraphs worth communicating. One of the things one will note about good blogging is that it runs about 5-10 paragraphs -- and if they can't say something in that space, they probably have nothing to say.
Repeat the first two paragraphs of development and you'll note nothing by shameless self-indulgence.
Most European countries (the "old" ones) do not produce enough children to even maintain their populations. In fact, immigrants into these areas are changing the culture rather dramatically - that and the emmigration by natives to such places as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and yes, the U.S.
Not quite. The last time time we had a dialogue, you wrote I defended Times OpEd columnists like I was a member of their staff. I replied that Brooks and Tierney are the only ones that I regularly post. BTW, what do I have to defend here?
You criticize their expected format in which they are typically expected to draw a conclusion, state the reasons for making that conclusion, and then make a recommendation to correct the situation in approximately 750 words of standard spacing. What are their regular OpEd columnists supposed to do, quit their job to start a blog when they have families to support?
"It is dying, and because of the very social liberalism that the nitwit Brooks extols."
It doesn't appear he is extolling it. It appears he is stating it to be the fact of the situation, in Europe, and that it seems to be part of their PROBLEM.
Brooks seems absolutely baffled that the proletariat is not happy. After all, every leftist in the United States has wet dreams of living in a such a tax supported cradle-to-grave nursery.
Don't all of our self-described "educated" keep threatening to take off for Paris and leave us stupids to our own devices? They will take their elephant-dung Madonnas, and artistic pedophiles, and Yoko Ono, and abandon us to Fox News and NASCAR. In two weeks we will be begging them to return.
It's obvious to Brooks that France and Germany need more stupid redneck workers to make the money and just shut up about God and "natural rights" and all that other Yankee/NRA/Bush/McDonald's/Constitutional drivel.
"Over the last few decades, American liberals have lauded the German model or the Swedish model or the European model. But these models are not flexible enough for the modern world. They encourage people to cling fiercely to entitlements their nation cannot afford. And far from breeding a confident, progressive outlook, they breed a reactionary fear of the future that comes in left- and right-wing varieties - a defensiveness, a tendency to lash out ferociously at anybody who proposes fundamental reform or at any group, like immigrants, that alters the fabric of life.
This is the chief problem with the welfare state, which has nothing to do with the success or efficiency of any individual program."
Read it again. Don't let who signs his paychecks fool you. Don't confuse him with David Brock. Brooks is not a liberal. He's putting it right of the face of Europe's left and Europe's local xenophobes, not that unassimilated Muslims shouldn't be a cause for concern.
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