America Alone by Mark Steyn Page A

Right could write a book like that, but, as things transpire, the great Euro-thinker is not arguing that America is betraying the Founding Fathers, but that the Founding Fathers themselves got it hopelessly wrong. This becomes explicit when he compares the American Revolution with the French Revolution of 1789, and decides the latter was better because instead of the radical individualism (boo!) of the thirteen colonies the French promoted "a new social contract" (hurrah!).
    Well, you never know. It may be the defects of America's Founders that help explain why the United States has lagged so far behind France in technological innovation, economic growth, military performance, standard of living, etc. Mr. Hutton insists that "all western democracies subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are liberal or leftist." Given that New Hampshire, for example, has been a continuous democracy for two centuries longer than Germany, this seems a dubious postulation. It would be more accurate to say that almost all European nations subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are statist. Or, as Hutton has it,
    "the European tradition is much more mindful that men and women are social animals and that individual liberty is only one of a spectrum of values that generate a good society." America Alone

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    Precisely. And it's the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to what Hutton calls "the primacy of society" that's blighted the Continent for over a century: statism--or "the primacy of society"--is what Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the European Union all have in common. The curse of the Continent is big ideas, each wacky notion a response to the last flop: the prewar German middle classes put their hopes in Hitler as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks; likewise, the postwar German middle classes decided European integration was their bulwark against a resurgence of Nazism.
    True, after Fascism and Communism, the European Union seems comparatively innocent--not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivial pan-European directives that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy-bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government. Europeans never feel obliged to defend their mystical belief in statism: though they claim to be post-Christian rationalists, it's mostly a matter of blind faith. That's why Will Hutton feels almost physically insecure when he's in one of the few spots on the planet where the virtues of the state religion are questioned. "In a world that is wholly private," he says of America, "we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us." He deplores the First Amendment and misses government-regulated media, which in the EU ensures that all public expression is within approved parameters (i.e., the typical discussion panel on the Continent is comprised of representatives of the center-left, the far left, and the loony left). "Europe," he explains, "acts to ensure that television and radio conform to public interest criteria."
    "Public interest criteria ": keep that bland phrase in your head when you need to know everything that's wrong with Europe. It's code-speak for a kind of easy-listening tyranny.
    "Public interest criteria" doesn't mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite--via various appointed bodies decide what the public's interest is for them. Which is why there are no Rush Limbaughs or James Dobsons on European radio. But you do hear a lot of Will Hutton.
    The real issue, though, is not whether you like Euro-statism.
    Regardless of how you feel about it, it's kaput. The un-American activities in which Europe has invested its identity are deeply self-destructive. Secondary-impulse states can be very agreeable--who wouldn't want to live in a world where the burning political priorities are