The cliché is that polarisation, extreme inequality and fake news et cetera are problems plaguing the west. In fact, they are, above all, problems plaguing the US. Whereas western Europe just has a bad cold, the US has caught influenza (with Donald Trump as a symptom, not the cause). The US now probably resembles Brazil or Argentina more than it does Germany or Spain. The one western European country that shares much of the US’s dysfunction is the UK, but even it probably won’t produce a Trump. Here’s why the US is far more unstable than western Europe:
Inequality is much worse in the US. The country’s
Gini coefficient after taxes and transfers (a good measure of inequality) is 0.394, higher than anywhere in western Europe, according to the OECD. The only western European country that approaches US inequality is Britain, as witness the
disaster at London’s Grenfell tower block in wealthy Kensington. The UK also (unusually for Europe) has less social mobility than the US.
The Gini is the US’s biggest single problem, says Paul McCulley, former chief economist of asset management group Pimco. Reduce that number, and all else will follow, he believes. The US has got so out of whack that McCulley told me both he and Bill Gross, Pimco’s longtime “bond king”, now support self-described socialist Bernie Sanders.
The US is a plutocracy to a degree unimaginable in western Europe. One reason Republicans are trying to
strip healthcare from about 22 millionpeople despite a probable electoral backlash is to please Americans for Prosperity, the political vehicle of the billionaire Koch brothers.
Poor Americans live worse than poor Europeans. American life expectancy averages 79, against 81.5 in impoverished, heavy-smoking Greece, and 83 in Italy. This isn’t only down to diet, though sugar’s omnipresence in the US in itself represents a triumph of industry lobbying. Note also that European countries typically offer free or cheap university tuition. The state gives Europeans a lot, and most of them know it.
Political polarisation is worse in the US. Coalition systems such as Germany’s discourage polarisation, because centrist parties usually wind up in government. But in France, too, Emmanuel Macron became president claiming to be “neither left nor right”. Even Britain’s Brexit offers a potential middle ground absent in Trump’s America: most Remainers are now
pushing to stay in the European single market.
Western Europe’s media landscape is also less polarised than America’s, says the Reuters Institute’s recent
Digital News Report. Most European countries have major media that are trusted by both rightists and leftists. These can be boring state broadcasters, or the Ansa news agency in Italy, or Germany’s centrist mass media, says the report. Consequently, few western Europeans inhabit ideological “filter bubbles”.
But US liberals and rightwingers alike consume only sources that they are predisposed to believe. Despite this, Americans have less trust in media than any western Europeans bar the French.
Fake news — “‘invented’ to make money or discredit others” — is especially pervasive in the US, says the same report. “Very few people can accurately recall having seen [such items], except in the US.” Fake news is so foreign to Germans and French people that they describe it using the English phrase. Europe’s only major fake-news purveyors are the UK’s tabloids. Indeed, mass-produced fake news is a British Victorian invention, like football or the railways. But most British tabloid readers also get information from the BBC. Most viewers of the partisan far-right Fox News have no such check on falsehood.
The US and UK, the countries that created the
postwar international order, are now keenest to overturn it. Ian Buruma, new editor of The New York Review of Books, told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad: “Precisely the fact that the Brits and Americans won the [second world] war made them vulnerable. Generation after generation grew up with national pride, the feeling of being special . . . British and American exceptionalism prepared the path in those countries for a reactionary nationalism.” By contrast, continental Europeans emerged from the war humbled, stripped of their go-it-alone fantasies.
The US president is both head of government and head of state. Many American voters therefore seek to elect a messianic figure who can supposedly embody the nation, no matter how bizarre his policies. The extreme personalisation of last year’s US election campaign recalled the great-leader fixation in Russian or Arab politics.
The only western European country where the president has a similar role is France, but even there voters are more interested in policy: the Front National’s Marine Le Pen lost votes after she appeared unable to explain her own
plan to leave the euro. In most western European countries, the prime minister is an ejectable functionary who gets punished for incompetence.
Americans have guns. So the US’s political mess could end horribly in a way unimaginable in Europe, especially if Trump is impeached or a Democrat is narrowly elected in 2020.
The delusion that American problems are western problems probably exists because global opinion-formers are clustered in the US. In truth, “the west” no longer exists, so Europe needs its own public sphere.
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