U.S. is becoming too much like Europe says American

**Strengthandhonour** · #1 (**permalink**) Saturday, January 27th, 2007

U.S. is becoming too much like Europe
By JOHN REINIERS
Published: Jan 26, 2007

America is undergoing both cultural and ideological changes: Increased secularism, more pronounced on the northeast and west coasts and a shift toward democratic socialism of the European kind (which has many Europeans wallowing in a sense of terminal decline with high unemployment, as they try to protect jobs and welfare benefits.)

These are mutually exclusive phenomena; the more significant being ideological which was exacerbated by the surge in technological innovation which jump-started job exportation. A lower paid worker can push a button on a cutting edge machine in China and produce a product just as easily as a higher paid American or European.

Automobiles (The Shanghai Maple for one) are now being produced in China with anti-lock brakes, A/C and leather seats with a two-year warranty that sell for $6,500. The average American worker couldn't care less if all this globalization improves our economy. He expects to make union wages equivalent to those halcyon post World War II war boom days when the only buttons to be pushed were on machines in U.S. factories.

Democrats have tapped into this. The Iraq war is just frosting on the cake. It permitted those who felt like economic losers to chastise George Bush for being more concerned about advancing freedom with its enormous cost (Think World War II again or the Cold War), rather than spending all that money on programs to benefit America.

Old Europe is no different. In a recent French poll only 36 percent agreed that a free market economy was the best system available. Europeans, too, see themselves as victims of globalization. What the average European doesn't realize is that Europe is on the verge of becoming an "authentic" historical Disney World which will be a vacation destination for all those employed in countries which have figured out how to benefit from technology and globalization. The rampant growth of social programs in Europe, such as health care and pensions, if left unchecked, will bankrupt Europe. This is where we are heading.

John Naisbitt, former visiting fellow at Harvard, professor at Moscow University, currently on the faculty at Nanjing University in China, and having had appointments by both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, noted in his recent book "Mindsets."
"Europeans simply enjoy the 'free ride' they have gotten under the American security umbrella over the past six decades," he writes. "Given America's willingness to spend so much money protecting them, Europeans would rather spend their own money on social welfare programs, long vacations and shorter workweeks." (He and his wife live in Vienna Austria and love it.)

Walter Lippmann, no conservative, a political columnist and decisive analyst of foreign policy, of the stature of Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw, wrote a piece, "The Decline of American Democracy" in 1955 pointing out "The functional derangement of the relationship between the mass of the people and the government. The people have acquired power which they are incapable of exercising and the governments they elect have lost powers which they must recover if they are to govern. Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this century. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master....Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate... or otherwise manage to manipulate...their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular."

This is where we are now. Yet realize in the ensuing 50 years, the growth of television along with the traditional liberal print media fit neatly into this rubric. Populism is cool both here and in Europe. It is usually exhibited negatively. For example, about the only thing Democratic opinion-makers bring to the table is rage laced with ridicule. They thrive on their negative power to "advance politically only as they placate... their constituencies." The left leaning media keeps this drumbeat of negativity going strong.

Will it all be about investigations, Bush bashing, negative attacks on pharmaceutical and oil companies, corporate management and the filthy rich; or will the world hear a positive message?

John Reiniers is a columnist for Hernando Today. He lives in Spring Hill.

source: Hernando Today - Online Edition

**Arthur Gordon Pym** · #2 (**permalink**) Saturday, January 27th, 2007