Recent discussions here (here and here, for example), and on DKos have emphasized that dialogue between Americans and Europeans is increasingly difficult. We don't understand each other, and it seems to be getting worse, not better. When I say "worse, not better", I'm thinking in the short term (the last few years, and even over the last year), but also in the relatively long term. From my own recollection, it was certainly much easier for Americans and Europeans to agree at the time of the Vietnam War and particularly during the Nixon years (so why don't Iraq and Dubya produce the same effect, one may wonder?).
When I say "worse, not better", I'm thinking in the short term (the last few years, and even over the last year), but also in the relatively long term. From my own recollection, it was certainly much easier for Americans and Europeans to agree at the time of the Vietnam War and particularly during the Nixon years (so why don't Iraq and Dubya produce the same effect, one may wonder?).
As to whether we understand each other better now, I strongly doubt it.
Then came the 2004 election, when 66% of the American electorate was not "good and decent" enough to vote against a lying, thieving, criminally incompetent torturer and warmonger. The result was massive cognitive dissonance, which a lot of left-leaning Americans have sought to resolve by falling back on the "People are essentially the same everywhere" argument but with an ugly twist. You see it in every thread on dKos where "foreigners" dare to comment: Europeans, in particular the French, are "just as bad as Americans" or(when the dissonance reaches a peak) "exactly the same except much, much worse."
You may be onto something... Is the shocking discovery that America, the land of the Free, is just as bad (or worse(?)) as the nations from which it strived to be different after it seceded?
Perhaps it's part a phase of denial and/or re-adjustment to the dis-illusion of finding out that the New World can behave just as atrocious as the Old World...
My thoughts exactly.
Of course, everything has something wrong with it.
And Nirvana and human perfection are all around the last bend.
Last bend is a bit tricky. "When the abyss stares at me, it wets its pants." Brian Hopkins
