of
us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government) —
often face hard questions about our country from people we live among.
Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that
baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the
United States. Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a
guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat
free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be
considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans
abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded
“homeland,” now conspicuously in
with the rest of the world.
In
my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or
travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet. I’ve been to
both poles and a great many places in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve
talked with people all along the way. I still remember a time when to be
an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World
War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too
many reasons to go into here.
That’s changed, of course. Even
after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people — in the Middle
East, no less — willing to withhold judgment on the U.S. Many thought
that the Supreme Court’s
of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004. His
truly
spelled the end of America as the world had known it. Bush had started
a war, opposed by the entire world, because he wanted to and he could. A
majority of Americans supported him. And that was when all the
uncomfortable questions really began.
In
the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway,
through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those
two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the
questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a
single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you
crazy? Please explain.
Then recently, I traveled back to the
“homeland.” It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just
how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign
observers are far better informed about us than the average American is
about them. This is partly because the “news” in the American media is
so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how
other countries think — even countries with which we were recently, are
currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s belligerence alone,
not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world
to keep close track of us. Who knows, after all, what conflict the
Americans may drag you into next, as target or reluctant ally?
So
wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants
to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another
country
bombed in the name of
our “national security,” another peaceful protest march
attacked by our increasingly
militarized police, another
diatribe against
“big government” by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head
that very government in Washington. Such news leaves foreign audiences
puzzled and full of trepidation.
Question Time
Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which
1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way). At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone
oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of
national health care since
the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880. Some versions, as in France
and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private
systems. Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not
begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health
care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as
baffling, if not frankly brutal.
In the Scandinavian countries, long considered to be the most socially advanced in the world, a
national (physical
and mental) health program, funded by the state, is a big part — but
only a part — of a more general social welfare system. In Norway, where
I live, all citizens also have an equal right to
education (state subsidized
preschool from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty training or
university education and beyond),
unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave,
old age pensions,
and more. These benefits are not merely an emergency “safety net”;
that is, charitable payments grudgingly bestowed upon the needy. They
are universal: equally available to all citizens as human rights
encouraging social harmony — or as our own U.S. constitution would put
it, “domestic tranquility.” It’s no wonder that, for many years,
international evaluators have ranked Norway as the best place to
grow old, to
be a woman, and to
raise a child.
The title of “best” or “happiest” place to live on Earth comes down to a
neighborly contest among Norway and the other Nordic social
democracies, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland.
In Norway, all benefits are paid for mainly by
high taxation.
Compared to the mind-numbing enigma of the U.S. tax code, Norway’s is
remarkably straightforward, taxing income from labor and pensions
progressively, so that those with higher incomes pay more. The tax
department does the calculations, sends an annual bill, and taxpayers,
though free to dispute the sum, willingly pay up, knowing what they and
their children get in return. And because government policies
effectively redistribute wealth and tend to narrow the country’s slim
income gap, most Norwegians sail pretty comfortably in the same boat.
(Think about that!)
Bloggers note: The Norwegian benefits are also paid for from a sovereign wealth fund set up using the revenue from their part of the North Sea Oil. Britian frittered her portion away on current expenses, Norway set up this fund, which, by the way, is used, amongst other things, to fund Norwegian research, in order to create revenue for her programs.
Life and Liberty
This
system didn’t just happen. It was planned. Sweden led the way in the
1930s, and all five Nordic countries pitched in during the postwar
period to develop their own variations of what came to be called the
Nordic Model: a balance of regulated capitalism, universal social
welfare, political democracy, and the highest levels of
gender and
economic equality on the planet. It’s their system. They invented it.
They like it. Despite the efforts of an occasional conservative
government to muck it up, they maintain it. Why?
In all the Nordic
countries, there is broad general agreement across the political
spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met — when they can
cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their
transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their
aging parents — only then can they be free to do as they like. While the
U.S. settles for the fantasy that, from birth, every kid has an equal
shot at the American dream, Nordic social welfare systems lay the
foundations for a more authentic equality and individualism.
These
ideas are not novel. They are implied in the preamble to our own
Constitution. You know, the part about “we the People” forming “a more
perfect Union” to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings
of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Even as he prepared the
nation for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt memorably specified
components of what that general welfare should be in his State of the
Union address in 1941. Among the “simple basic things that must never be
lost sight of,” he
listed“equality
of opportunity for youth and others, jobs for those who can work,
security for those who need it, the ending of special privileges for the
few, the preservation of civil liberties for all,” and oh yes, higher
taxes to pay for those things and for the cost of defensive armaments.
Knowing
that Americans used to support such ideas, a Norwegian today is
appalled to learn that a CEO of a major American corporation
makes between
300 and 400 times as much as its average employee. Or that governors
Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey, having run up
their state’s debts by cutting taxes for the rich, now plan to
cover the loss with
money snatched from the pension funds of workers in the public sector.
To a Norwegian, the job of government is to distribute the country’s
good fortune reasonably equally, not send it zooming upward, as in
America today, to a sticky-fingered one percent.
In their
planning, Norwegians tend to do things slowly, always thinking of the
long term, envisioning what a better life might be for their children,
their posterity. That’s why a Norwegian, or any northern European, is
aghast to learn that two-thirds of American college students finish
their education in the red, some
owing $100,000 or more. Or that in the U.S., still the world’s richest country,
one in three children lives in poverty, along with
one in fiveyoung people between the ages of 18 and 34. Or that America’s recent
multi-trillion-dollar wars were fought on a credit card to be paid off by our kids. Which brings us back to that word: brutal.
Implications
of brutality, or of a kind of uncivilized inhumanity, seem to lurk in
so many other questions foreign observers ask about America like: How
could you set up that concentration camp in Cuba, and why can’t you shut
it down? Or: How can you pretend to be a Christian country and still
carry out the death penalty? The follow-up to which often is: How could
you pick as president a man proud of executing his fellow citizens at
the
fastest rate recorded in Texas history? (Europeans will not soon forget George W. Bush.)
Other things I’ve had to answer for include:
* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?
* Why can’t you understand science?
* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?
* How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
* How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?
* How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?
* Why do you Americans like guns so much? Why do you kill each other at such a rate?
To
many, the most baffling and important question of all is: Why do you
send your military all over the world to stir up more and more trouble
for all of us?
That last question is particularly pressing because
countries historically friendly to the United States, from Australia to
Finland, are struggling to keep up with an influx of refugees from
America’s wars and interventions. Throughout Western Europe and
Scandinavia, right-wing parties that have scarcely or never played a
role in government are now
rising rapidly on a wave of opposition to long-established immigration policies. Only last month, such a party almost
toppled the sitting social democratic government of Sweden, a generous
country that has absorbed more than its fair share of asylum seekers fleeing the shock waves of “the
finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”
The Way We Are
Europeans
understand, as it seems Americans do not, the intimate connection
between a country’s domestic and foreign policies. They often trace
America’s reckless conduct abroad to its refusal to put its own house in
order. They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety
net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its
organized
labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a
standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social
inequality in
almost a century.
They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and
next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and
fearful. They understand as well why so many Americans have lost trust
in a government that has done so little new for them over the past three
decades or more, except for Obama’s endlessly
embattled health care effort, which seems to most Europeans a pathetically modest proposal.
What
baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling
numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support
its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich. How to
explain that? In Norway’s capital, where a statue of a contemplative
President Roosevelt overlooks the harbor, many America-watchers think he
may have been the last U.S. president who understood and could explain
to the citizenry what government might do for all of them. Struggling
Americans, having forgotten all that, take aim at unknown enemies far
away — or on the far side of their own towns.
It’s hard to know
why we are the way we are, and — believe me — even harder to explain it
to others. Crazy may be too strong a word, too broad and vague to pin
down the problem. Some people who question me say that the U.S. is
“paranoid,” “backward,” “behind the times,” “vain,” “greedy,”
“self-absorbed,” or simply “dumb.” Others, more charitably, imply that
Americans are merely “ill-informed,” “misguided,” “misled,” or “asleep,”
and could still recover sanity. But wherever I travel, the questions
follow, suggesting that the United States, if not exactly crazy, is
decidedly a danger to itself and others. It’s past time to wake up,
America, and look around. There’s another world out here, an old and
friendly one across the ocean, and it’s full of good ideas, tried and
true.
Joni Ernst (Credit: AP/Charlie Neibergall)
Joni Ernst (Credit: AP/Charlie Neibergall)
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