Are Europeans Jealous of the United States?
October 30, 2017
Alex Henderson, Periodista and Technical Writer
No, Europeans are not jealous of the United States. Far from it. The notion that residents of France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland are all longing to move to the U.S. is a fantasy promoted by wingnuts who watch Fox News, read Ann Coulter’s books and listen to AM talk radio.
These days, Europeans feel badly for the majority of Americans and equate the U.S. with medical bankruptcy, mass incarceration, the Prison/Industrial Complex, the alt-right, police militarization, crippling student loan debt, low wages, violent Christian fundamentalists and a collapsing middle class.
It wasn’t always that way. The American middle class was the envy of the world after World War II. Europeans, in those days, equated the U.S. with upward mobility and a robust middle class. A college education practically guaranteed a good living, and millions of blue-collar men could easily support a wife and two kids and afford a mortgage when they were in their 20s. Unions were powerful in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
There were two superpowers in those days: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In Western Europe, the Soviet Union was feared and hated, while the U.S. was, problems and all, viewed as a symbol of hope.
But thanks to the horrors of union busting, neoliberalism, Reaganomics, unchecked corporatism, outsourcing, banksterism and Wall Street run amok, many Europeans now equate the U.S. with rot and decay and view it as a country of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%.
None of that is to say that modern-day Europe is idyllic by any stretch of the imagination. Unemployment is painfully high in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Banksters have brought considerable misery to Greece. The economy is much better in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, all of which have enough sense to realize that a capitalist free market economy needs a healthy middle class that can afford to buy the products.
I’ve known many American expatriates who became permanent residents of European countries. Very few of them had any desire to move back to the U.S., especially if they were older and had health problems.
Granted, an entry level job at El Pollo Loco is a step up if you grew up in a shantytown or villa miseria in La Paz, Bolivia or Guatemala City. But for the vast majority of Europeans, life in the U.S. would be a major hardship.
