Europe, Here We Come!

Two articles discussing the election results came out recently that I found rather interesting. One was written by Janet Daley of The Telegraph, and the other is written by Gerri Willis of Fox Business. They both make comparisons between the U.S. and Europe in light of the election results, and they both conclude we are busy trying to become very much like Europe. Here’s Janet Daley:

So Europe got the American president it wanted – the one who would present no threat to its own delusions. The United States is now officially one of us: an Old World country complete with class hatred, ethnic Balkanisation, bourgeois guilt and a paternalist ruling elite. And it is locked into the same death spiral of high public spending and self-defeating wealth redistribution as we are. Welcome to the future, and the beginning of what may turn out to be the terminal decline of the West.

Not to be outdone, here’s Gerri Willis:

Think we’re different from the Europeans? Think again. The proportion of Greek men in their 30’s that are working is higher than the proportion of men who work in the United States. That’s what this election was all about. People voted for free stuff, free money, and free benefits. A chicken and health care in every pot.

These women have correctly observed the alarming signal this election sent: We were warned almost nightly on the evening news about the disaster that awaits us if we follow in Europe’s footsteps and we appear to be Hell-bent to go there anyway. Daley concludes that we may yet rediscover our soul as a nation but Willis laments that we’ve lost our way:

So here’s where we are; nearly 200 years after Francis Scott Key penned the national anthem and immortalized the phrase, “Land of the Free.” We’ve become just that, but not in the way we quite expected. We’re the land of the free because an increasing number of us are getting a free ride. That, my friends, is not the American way.

There’s been a lot of suggestions as to what the GOP should do moving forward: They should work to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, they should become more pro-choice, they should be more conservative, they should be more moderate, they should throw out the RINOs and be more consistent conservatives, and so on and so forth. I’m not sure that it matters. A large portion of the electorate at present wants government provided goodies. And everyone knows what party to vote for in order to get them.

We have become “just another declining society”, writes Daley. And we did it while we watched and then imitated a self-destructing Europe. And most of us didn’t seem to care.