I've lived in different parts of Europe off and on over the past thirty years.
First, the "Muslim threat" is not as great as it seems judging from reports. While it's true that Muslims contribute disproportionately to crime and welfare, they're not everywhere. What Europe imported with Muslims are ghetto areas filled with unemployment, violence and drugs, much like America's internal Third World of black ghettoes.
This is especially shocking in Germany, simply because Germany never had ghettoes like this after WWII but now does. What's also different is the homelessness, which used to be limited to older alcoholics hanging out by the train stations. Now it's quite visible with people camping under bridges. The thing the Europeans find most shocking is how European cities now often resemble American ones with much higher crimes of violence, homelessness, etc.
Second, the "welfare state" isn't quite what it seems. It has been cut back a lot recently, for example, several years ago a young, single mother unemployed in Berlin was only getting about E800/month. She was told to apply for a job as a prostitute if she wanted to keep receiving benefits. This caused an uproar and the law was changed to exclude prostitution as a required job application. But you can see the welfare amount is not very high. The welfare systems also exclude most part-time work, which (like here) has proliferated because employers can cheat the tax system by farming out 1 full-time job to 2 or 3 part-time jobs. This also reduces or eliminates the benefits employees receive.
Europeans have simply made different choices than Americans because they have never felt able to advance very much, so they have demanded job and benefit security above opportunity. And the resulting tax system heavily penalizes you if you want to get ahead by working harder. So most Europeans rationally choose not to work harder. The same is beginning to happen here as globalization and mass immigration destroy the American job market, more younger Americans are giving up and choosing socialism: again, for them, that represents a rational choice.
All the trends that this piece describes as destroying Europe apply here as well. Most of them are due to globalization, which promotes outsourcing, mass immigration, and using leftist ideology to fracture the working class by gender and ethnicity. Trump's election has barely nicked them, and with the GOP "majority" failing to enact any of his agenda into law, his reforms are unlikely to last.
Trump’s election has barely nicked them, and with the GOP “majority” failing to enact any of his agenda into law, his reforms are unlikely to last.
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The reforms will eventually come, regardless of Trump.
Economic reality will force many past globalist policies to change.
It’s still early, but is just a matter of time.