The trouble with folks like Mark Steyn is that all their clamor about Europe being swept away in a tide of hostile immigrants obscures the very real problem of assimilating new arrivals. Steyn, for example, is absolutely correct that criminalizing Geert Wilders’ moronic proposal to ban the Koran is antithetical to the idea of a free society. But I can’t help thinking that these warnings would be a lot more credible if Steyn and his ilk hadn’t spent so much time making wrong-headed predictions about Europe’s imminent Islamist takeover.

As for Wilders, I do hope our European cousins realize that manufacturing free speech martyrs is not a very effective way to marginalize extremists. Wilders’ substantive views are so radical they’re almost self-refuting – strip away the persecution complex and vague allusions to “defending free speech” and the guy’s platform is proto-fascistic (Alex Massie’s apt distillation: “In other words, the only way to save the western liberal tradition is to kill it”).  Would Wilders survive without free publicity from being banned in Britain and his absurd prosecution in The Netherlands? I doubt it, if only because he would no longer be able to posture as some heroic protector of free speech. Instead, he’d be stuck explaining how banning religious texts is consistent with European liberty.

Scott’s long and deeply-felt reflection on American gun culture is worth reading in full, and I certainly understand why an outsider would find our collective infatuation with things that go ‘boom’ baffling or even dangerous. As a card-carrying coastal elite, I also suspect my views on personal firearms are closer to Scott’s than to most rural Americans’: In addition to not owning a gun, I have never wanted to own one, and watching someone casually stroll by with a glock on their hip is enough to make me pretty uncomfortable.

That said, I’m wary of broad-brushed cultural essentialism, and I think Scott’s view of America’s “undercurrent of violence” is a bit too reminiscent of s0mething Mark Steyn spat out in the wake of another tragedy, this time in Canada:

Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,”  the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

Obviously, these men didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory in the midst of a terrible shooting. But does the inaction of a few scared students indict Canadian society as a whole? Does this incredible tragedy  reveal some hidden undercurrent of Canadian passivity? I think not, and besides, a quick Google search reveals any number of counter-examples (the honor roll of Canadian dead in Afghanistan immediately comes to mind.

Violence in America is less extensive than you might think. And broad-brushed essentialism – however intuitive – detracts from our ability to address serious problems by laying blame at the feet of some socially-constructed bogeyman. Sometimes schoolbus bullying is just bullying. And sometimes a shooting is just a terrible tragedy.

One thing that has long baffled me has been the idea on the American Right that Europe is some kind of socialist hell-hole that borders on Communist.  The thrust of the argument always seems to be that European government is so large and intrusive, and it public mores so lacking and dare I say nihilistic that it is something akin to Hell on Earth.  Mark Steyn, not surprisingly, expresses this attitude fairly succinctly, writing:

Europeanism is like Communism: the less time you’ve spent living it in practice the better disposed you are to it in theory. In the same way, few of those Americans who want to introduce Canadian-style health care to the U.S. have ever had surgery at the Royal Victoria. Indeed, America is full of immigrants whose hostility to Euro-Canadian public policy derives explicitly from their prolonged exposure to it.

Of course, the definition of “Europeanism” is ill-defined.  So far as I can tell, it’s a reference to a government with a large social welfare system combined with a secularized social policy.  The assumption, which is largely based on a false equivalency that social safety nets = socialism = Road to Serfdom and that United States = World’s Only Bastion of Free Market Capitalism = World’s Only Free Country, is that these “Europeanist” policies make Europe an absolute hell-hole. 

Despite my deep love of the free market, I’ve always found this chain of thought to be utterly absurd.  For starters, the idea that Europe is some kind of hell-hole at all doesn’t seem to line up with reality, as Alex Massie points out:

Never mind that, according to the most recent World Values Survey, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Malta, Luxembourg, Sweden each reported higher levels of happiness and “life satisfaction” than the United States. That isn’t to say that the US is unhappy, merely that there is more than one route to happiness. And that’s the point: europe (however broadly defined) and the United States are each remarkable success stories permitting a greater percentage of the population than at any point in history has the opportunity to make their own choices about how to lead their lives.

But there’s more to it than this.  If “Europeanism” really is that much of a restraint on freedom, one would expect that European nations would have exceedingly tightly restricted economies, with comparatively little economic liberty.  Thankfully, that lunatic left-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation has long compiled a statistical ranking of economic freedoms around the world. 

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