The inestimable Steven Den Beste examines Mercurial America in reviewing an IHT article by John Vinocur entitled Europe in for a letdown if it’s counting on Kerry .
Read the IHT article first to read the common misconception held by most Europeans. If Kerry wins, America will go back to be subservient to the wishes of Europe. The problem, of course, is that America has never been subservient to Europe. As SDB has pointed out in the past, although a lot of us (particularly our Founding Fathers) are from Europe, we must remember that we escaped from Europe.
If you examine the thoughts and policy positions of ranking Democrats, you don’t really find much difference between them and Bush. This causes no end of grief to people like Noam Chimpsky, but these are the facts of life, thank God. I wish the Dhimitude European Union the best of luck, but I do not wish to follow their lead.
From Mercurial America:
There’s also a tendency in Europe to engage in projection, and to think of America as being Europe’s child, a rebellious teenager. Once we Americans “grow up”, we’ll realize that they were right all along, but in the mean time this is just a phase that all children go through.
The evidence from history is that all these assumptions are false. They ignore that evidence; they explain it away by saying that America has changed. Even if the nation was willing to sacrifice 400,000 dead in WWII, that was then and this is now, and modern Americans are different.
So they discount the fact that America remained steadfast during the entire Cold War despite both parties electing Presidents during that interval. There were differences in style and approach towards how the Cold War should be handled, but never any doubt that it would be handled, no matter which party held the White House.
And they discount the degree to which our system maintains continuity of policy. Even if Kerry wins this year, there’s still essentially no chance of the Democrats regaining control of the House, and that would mean that the Democrats would have to compromise on foreign policy even if they thought the way the Europeans somehow hope they do.