WSJ on why Europe falls behind America

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It’s entirely appropriate that the weeks leading up to the 250th anniversary of American independence have become an occasion for drawing contrasts between the U.S. and Europe. Let’s make sure we remember the most important difference: We’re earnest. They aren’t.

This is less obvious than material prosperity, which has occasioned the most discussion. The World Cup has brought legions of European fans to our shores who, in the age of social media, are able to broadcast in real time their stunned encounters with American abundance. The economic gap between the two sides of the Atlantic has rarely been so obvious to ordinary Europeans as it is now.

Many Europeans have visited America over the years. But a long weekend in New York or Los Angeles will unfold global cities you expect to be sui generis. The new European discovery is that once you step out of America’s first-tier cities, you find places that also are an order of magnitude “more so” than Europe’s equivalents. And in case you haven’t heard, we have air conditioning and they don’t.

Yet to think of the contrast between the two places only in these terms is to underestimate the stupendous achievement we commemorate this weekend. There is a profound and decisive contrast between the U.S. and Europe in terms of our ability to believe in something.

This manifests as stereotypical American earnestness. Ask Europeans to describe American culture and you’ll eventually hear some version of gibe about our lack of irony: “Americans take everything literally.” “Americans are always talking about God.” “Americans really mean the whole ‘freedom’ thing” (this last in connection with foreign-policy debates, and disparagingly). Europeans constantly seem taken aback at how seriously Americans take themselves.

Irony is a quality of which Europe has entirely too much. It shows up in civic life most glaringly as a corrosive sense of cynicism about patriotism, which in Europe is treated with a wink and a nod.

Americans of most political stripes unabashedly fly the American flag from their homes and adorn everything from T-shirts to trucks with the red, white and blue. Do anything similar in most European countries and they’ll think something is wrong with you. Germans do it only during international sporting contests. Displaying the St. George’s standard, the flag of England, has become an act of political protest precisely because mainstream opinion still views that form of attachment to country as gauche; the Union Jack, representing the whole of the U.K., is only slightly less loaded unless it’s used as a corporate marketing gimmick.

Europeans often struggle to understand what their countries are about. The French come closest to a grand national idea—liberté, egalité, fraternité, although this is refracted through repeated failures to convert those principles into stable governance. Germans for good reasons are squeamish about articulating a strong idea of “Germanness.” The British have become startlingly careless about this—their citizenship test is as likely to pose questions about soap operas as about Magna Carta.

Europe used to have a grand idea of itself rooted in Christianity, the social bonds of feudalism and the long afterglow of the Roman Empire. This hasn’t survived two centuries of bloody revolution, lapsing religious faith and the catastrophic first half of the 20th century. Many Europeans now appear to interpret their history as a warning against the dangers of any sort of ideology. They retreat instead into an affected insouciance.

Americans can be as cynical as our European friends when it’s warranted—as it often is concerning daily politics. But we have preserved our ability to hold tenaciously to an idea. Our earnestness is what inspired the founding generation to take such great risks in service of a belief. Earnestness triggered our deepest national crisis in the 1860s and fueled the redemptive civil-rights movement a century later. Europe’s self-belief wilted under similar challenges; America’s grew stronger.

To a degree that seems unthinkable in Europe, our most bruising national arguments aren’t about ethno-nationalism per se, but about what our national idea is or ought to be. Witness the controversy a puzzles-and-recipes company sparked when one of its units produced a “1619 Project” to undercut the established history of the country’s origins. Such brawls happen because critics of America’s revolutionary ideals understand they must somehow dislodge Americans’ core understanding of themselves. That so many Americans refuse to surrender those ideals is what causes the pushback.

The achievement of July 1776 was to articulate an idea—that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights endowed by the Creator—that could justify, sustain and reward that kind of earnestness. That we’ve been able to do so for 250 years and despite our own periodic failures to live up to our idea is an achievement of which to be proud.

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