The future that didn’t work

Robert Samuelson makes the case that “Europe as we know it is slowly going out of business.” It’s a case we’ve been making, with a little less sense of inevitability, for much of the past three years. When I started with Power Line, I sometimes used the phrase “the former Western Europe” to signify that Western Europe, like the Soviet Union, had gone out of business. Now, “Europe” itself seems to be headed in the same direction.
I should also note that American leftists and a considerable portion of the Democratic party embrace key policies and attitudes that are contributing significantly to Europe’s deep decline — welfare statism, marginalization of religion, and mass immigration (although the latter is a more ambiguous issue politically, and immigration doesn’t threaten us nearly as much as it threatens Europe because Latin Americans aren’t Muslims). It isn’t an accident that John Kerry is so pro-European. Nor is it an accident that less than a year ago American leftists were publishing books about how the Europeans were going to supplant us as an economic power because our society is too individualistic. Talk about books you can flush down the toilet.

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