You in fact seemed pretty much to say exactly the things I said..Perhaps read your own blog….!
"The Brexit-fueled racism of the UK continues to this day". Which I'd say was and is complete rubbish, though some very strong Remain partisans wanted to paint this picture. (A few attacks in the street were misrepresented).
(I always find the dislike of Brexit by citizens of other nations quite amazing. Do American and Canadian citizens wish to merge their nations into a supranational political union? As the European Union undoubtedly is, for better or worse. Or even Indian and Pakistani citizens who regularly comment - nations that can't even seem to open more than a couple of land borders between them!).
"Europeans find government assistance normal and unremarkable, because to us, it’s literally thousands of years old, dating back to the Roman grain dole in 134 BCE. Ancient Rome, those notorious Marxists". In the UK at least, government assistance has been much more contentious and even at times somewhat stigmatised, than that comment implies.
There is no continuity between the Roman Empire and modern European states, and the modern bureaucracies that run them are in fact little, if any older than the US equivalents. If you aren't making that claim, I don't know why you even mentioned the Roman corn dole.
I think you are confused as well on socialism/ social democracy. Ok, it's confusing because words are used in very different ways and often just as attack terms by opponents (e.g. neoliberalism, Marxism, fascism). Socialism is mentioned a few times as if, rather like the word "Christian" is often used, it just means vaguely good, rather than a proven disastrous economic system, not least for the people it is supposed to be helping. If Bernie Sanders wants that, he's an idiot, but I suspect he probably does want something akin to a bigger welfare state - you'd know better than me about that.
Let's agree that Left and Right are fuzzy terms anyway, each country's history is different and it is easy to over-generalise. The big difference between the US and Europe used to be that the former was fundamentally an immigration society. However at the same time its former slave population was treated abominably, especially with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, and Europe has no institutional equivalent of that history, although of course it has racism.
Lastly, healthcare is an area where the US system is unambiguously to the "Right" of Europe, with a system that is both extremely expensive and non-comprehensive. The heated rhetoric and feeling over this in the States does seem very alien to the European debate, although we have our own problems in Britain, with the creaking, entirely state-run and funded NHS. And then there are those guns and mass shootings - I'm not going to make any glib comments about that because no doubt the reasons are complex. But the "Right" in the United States definitely are far keener on gun ownership than any equivalent in Europe.
This truly is a terrible analysis, getting "progressively" (pun intended!) as it went on!. I'm British, and while we are used to pretty much everyone being rude about us, including routinely in our own country, the picture of post Brexit Britain being a xenophobic hellhole is as ludicrously wide of the mark as similar comments about the US. Britain currently had higher levels of migration than the US. By the way, the greater the levels of immigration does not equal virtue. It is precisely the very high levels in recent years in very stable, homogenous nations previously unlike the US without a major culture of immigration that has caused the current problems. Or is it all those formerly progressive Swedes have become racists?
Again note to 'progressives' - all human beings everywhere have a propensity to prefer their own and be suspicious and even hostile to strangers. That is one reason why we should proceed with care in carrying out policies leading to major demographic change, which westen European countries certainly have been doing - for example London is now a majority foreign born (not just non-white) city, which has happened in a very few decades.
As for the comparison of state capacity and social programmes, Europe governance is as modern - or ancient - as the US. No, our welfare states do not owe their existence to the Roman Empire's corn dole - the analysis is only about 2 millennia out!
This is a very valuable article which I have not finished reading!
You in fact seemed pretty much to say exactly the things I said..Perhaps read your own blog….!
"The Brexit-fueled racism of the UK continues to this day". Which I'd say was and is complete rubbish, though some very strong Remain partisans wanted to paint this picture. (A few attacks in the street were misrepresented).
(I always find the dislike of Brexit by citizens of other nations quite amazing. Do American and Canadian citizens wish to merge their nations into a supranational political union? As the European Union undoubtedly is, for better or worse. Or even Indian and Pakistani citizens who regularly comment - nations that can't even seem to open more than a couple of land borders between them!).
"Europeans find government assistance normal and unremarkable, because to us, it’s literally thousands of years old, dating back to the Roman grain dole in 134 BCE. Ancient Rome, those notorious Marxists". In the UK at least, government assistance has been much more contentious and even at times somewhat stigmatised, than that comment implies.
There is no continuity between the Roman Empire and modern European states, and the modern bureaucracies that run them are in fact little, if any older than the US equivalents. If you aren't making that claim, I don't know why you even mentioned the Roman corn dole.
I think you are confused as well on socialism/ social democracy. Ok, it's confusing because words are used in very different ways and often just as attack terms by opponents (e.g. neoliberalism, Marxism, fascism). Socialism is mentioned a few times as if, rather like the word "Christian" is often used, it just means vaguely good, rather than a proven disastrous economic system, not least for the people it is supposed to be helping. If Bernie Sanders wants that, he's an idiot, but I suspect he probably does want something akin to a bigger welfare state - you'd know better than me about that.
Let's agree that Left and Right are fuzzy terms anyway, each country's history is different and it is easy to over-generalise. The big difference between the US and Europe used to be that the former was fundamentally an immigration society. However at the same time its former slave population was treated abominably, especially with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, and Europe has no institutional equivalent of that history, although of course it has racism.
Lastly, healthcare is an area where the US system is unambiguously to the "Right" of Europe, with a system that is both extremely expensive and non-comprehensive. The heated rhetoric and feeling over this in the States does seem very alien to the European debate, although we have our own problems in Britain, with the creaking, entirely state-run and funded NHS. And then there are those guns and mass shootings - I'm not going to make any glib comments about that because no doubt the reasons are complex. But the "Right" in the United States definitely are far keener on gun ownership than any equivalent in Europe.
This truly is a terrible analysis, getting "progressively" (pun intended!) as it went on!. I'm British, and while we are used to pretty much everyone being rude about us, including routinely in our own country, the picture of post Brexit Britain being a xenophobic hellhole is as ludicrously wide of the mark as similar comments about the US. Britain currently had higher levels of migration than the US. By the way, the greater the levels of immigration does not equal virtue. It is precisely the very high levels in recent years in very stable, homogenous nations previously unlike the US without a major culture of immigration that has caused the current problems. Or is it all those formerly progressive Swedes have become racists?
Again note to 'progressives' - all human beings everywhere have a propensity to prefer their own and be suspicious and even hostile to strangers. That is one reason why we should proceed with care in carrying out policies leading to major demographic change, which westen European countries certainly have been doing - for example London is now a majority foreign born (not just non-white) city, which has happened in a very few decades.
As for the comparison of state capacity and social programmes, Europe governance is as modern - or ancient - as the US. No, our welfare states do not owe their existence to the Roman Empire's corn dole - the analysis is only about 2 millennia out!