For decades, the American left has contrasted the U.S.’s allegedly hidebound approach to economic and social issues with the enlightened way nations like France, Germany, and Sweden typically handle those matters. It’s a framework that seems to be falling apart, according to New York magazine’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells, mostly as a result of Europe’s overall shift to the right.
“The [European] continent is no longer a subject of liberal pining and aspiration,” wrote Wallace-Wells in a Tuesday article. “Europe and Israel have…been examples of alternative ways in which American society might be arranged, if it were less individualistic, more communal. But after the news of the past few weeks, and in many ways the past decade, these dreams for Europe and Israel have rarely looked more like a fantasy than they do now. America and Europe seem to be moving in different directions.”
From Wallace-Wells’ piece, which was posted not long before the polls closed in the Israeli elections (bolding added):
[A] quiet turn…has taken place throughout the Obama era, as Europe has come to seem an uglier place under economic and social stress: The continent is no longer a subject of liberal pining and aspiration. We've fallen out of love with Europe.
Israel has a way of making the matter more poignant and fraught, and so it was interesting when yesterday, with the election there drawing to a close, Paul Krugman turned his attention to the "disturbing transformation" in Israel's "income distribution and society," in which a putatively prosperous place had returned almost all of its gains to a tiny oligarchy, while the share of Israel's population in poverty had doubled and the portion of its children who are poor has quadrupled…
Europe and Israel have…been examples of alternative ways in which American society might be arranged, if it were less individualistic, more communal. But after the news of the past few weeks, and in many ways the past decade, these dreams for Europe and Israel have rarely looked more like a fantasy than they do now. America and Europe seem to be moving in different directions. Obama has for most of his presidency been an ideologically isolated figure. Conservative politicians have held power in most of America's closest political allies: David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Benjamin Netanyahu, Stephen Harper, and Felipe Calderón. (France has been a mix of left and right, but it is hard to see any Obama-ists in there.) The gap between the social safety net in Europe and the United States, often understood as an inextricably cultural phenomenon, looks somewhat narrower now, with the push [in the U.S.] toward universal health-care coverage…
Today, for a fleeting moment, liberals may find something improbably hopeful in Israel…But I suspect that the real subject of liberal idealism will soon, once again, be America. In a subterranean way, this may be helping to strengthen the current spasms of anxiety over a Hillary Clinton candidacy [and] a heartfelt clamor for a more authentically liberal figure like Al Gore. Which isn't to say that there aren't plenty of good domestic reasons for progressives to look askance at…Clinton. But the matter of the Democratic presidential primary bears just a little more stress and weight if you believe that America, for all its limitations, is what liberals have got.
