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.