Quote Of The Day

On American Europhilia:

Liberals want the U.S. to learn from contemporary Europe how to minimize extremes of inequality. Conservatives want the U.S. to learn from Victorian Britain how to design charity for the poor. Liberals want to learn from the successful practices of particular existing 21st-century European countries how to deal with particular issues like retirement policy, regional industrial clusters and apprenticeship policies. Conservatives want to learn about the modern economy by exhuming the speculations of long-dead European classical liberals -- French, English and Central European. Liberals want the U.S. to learn from the contemporary European Union how to structure a workable system of international institutions. Conservatives want the U.S. to study the grand strategy of the 19th-century British empire and the tactics of the 19th-century Prussian army. Liberals want to view the American founding and the Civil War through their own eyes. Conservatives want to view them through the eyes of a German professor born in 1899.

- Michael Lind, "Why do conservatives want to
European-ize America?,"
Salon, June 15^th, 2010