The 'europoors' rants reflect an American insecurity
Social media has been inundated lately by Americans and Brits insisting life is much better in the US than in poverty-stricken Europe. The timing tells us more about them than it does about us.
There’s a particularly virulent strand of column-publishing and Twitter/X debate happening right now which, if it continues, will require me to seek medical attention for perpetual eye roll. It consists of American and British people gleefully writing about America’s explosive economic growth at the moment, and comparing it to Europe’s sluggish post-Covid recovery. Everyone seems to have their own opinion explaining the difference, the most convincing of which I find the idea that the EU has stuck with conservative neoliberal orthodoxies for the economy while America has been quietly more flexible.
On Twitter, these columns have then translated to a bunch of reply guys (it’s always men) gloating about the American economy and mocking the “europoors” who live in abject poverty while enviously looking across the Atlantic. Life is much better in America, they insist, because they have tumble dryers, bigger houses, bigger cars, higher salaries and, of course, freedom. These messages are not only coming from Americans but also from Brits - and it feels to me like the genesis for this is coming more from the latter than the former. There’s a particular strain of Tory Britain-bashing America-obsessed London elite, in the mould of Dan Hannan, who seem to think they are Americans born in the wrong body.
As someone who grew up in the US and moved to Europe at age 26, I could go on with a nuanced take about the positives and negatives of each. I’ll leave that to others. What I find much more interesting is why we’re getting this sudden rush of America-gloating and Europoor-bashing at this particular moment. This conversation isn’t being sparked in the EU. All of these Twitter flare-ups are started by people in Britain or America, and when people in the EU reply to point out that what they’re saying is nonsense, it’s “cope from pathetic europoors”. In other words, this isn’t a two-way dialogue. This is a man draped in red, white and blue standing on a soapbox on the street and screaming at European passers-by, who occasionally stop to challenge him.
Why have Americans suddenly become so insecure about their own supposed greatness? 20 years ago it would have just been taken as a given that life in America is better than life in Europe - also by most Europeans. For Americans, Europe was a holiday destination, not a real place with real economies who might compete with the mighty US. I can attest to this from personal experience. When I emigrated in 2006, Americans couldn’t really wrap their heads around what I was doing. My last job in the US was TV and radio reporting covering the US Congress in Washington. During that time I read Jeremy Rifkin’s The European Dream and it inspired me to move to Europe. My intention then, as it remains, was to do a permanent move for a better life. Since the US has no history of emigration like European countries do, people couldn’t quite understand this concept. They would get it if I was taking some time off to go live the wine and cheese life for awhile. They could understand it if my job was temporarily transferring me to Europe for a few years (as some of my friends and family have done). They could not understand the idea that I would choose to immigrate to Europe, without a job (or, at the time, a European passport), in search of a better life. This had always only happened in the other direction, as my Italian Great Grandfather did in 1916. 90 years later after his boat trip across the Atlantic, I used Italy’s strange ancestry citizenship policy to get myself an EU passport through him. If you had told him then that his great grandson would use his Italian roots to emigrate the other way to improve his life, he probably wouldn’t have believed you.
But now, 20 years later, my friends and family get it. Since 2016, as the United States seems to drift closer and closer to democratic collapse, I keep being told during my biannual visits to my country of birth that they are envious. My peers my age who I graduated high school and college with (a lot of whom, I can tell you candidly, are pretty damn miserable), say they wish they had made the move when they could have when they were younger. We all grew up being told that America is the best country on earth, that all other countries are living in squalor and we’re so lucky to have been born where we were. I’ve had experiences of American visitors coming to Europe for the first time feeling shocked and confused to find that so many things are more developed than in the US.
For years, Europeans also operated under the assumption that life in America was better than in Europe. Growing up on a continent dominated by American culture, they have been inundated with idealized Hollywood images of how great life in the US is. When I moved from New York City to London in 2006 I heard a constant response of “but why would you come here?” Ditto for when I later moved to Paris and Brussels. The people saying this had no experience of living in America themselves (or, often, even visiting). They were basing their assumption that life must be better there based on the television, movies and music they have been surrounded by their whole lives. Over the years many Europeans have told me they dream of one day winning the “green card lottery” to win a chance to live in America, as if it’s a prize. It’s a system that is incredibly insulting to Europeans, but for decades in the European mind it made sense.
However over the past ten years I’ve noticed this perception has been slowly changing here in Europe, and it’s also starting to change in America. No longer is the starting assumption point that America is great and Europe is inferior. Americans have started to wake up to the economic power of the European Union, which is now a larger market than the US. The spread of English as Europe’s lingua franca, at the same time that social media has connected the world, has also enabled more communication across the Atlantic. For the first time, Europeans have started to see the truth about life in America. And even though the US remains in a cultural bubble (media goes out but rarely comes in) and Americans don’t see much of the outside world, they are still starting to see glimpses of what daily life (not vacations) in Europe is really like. They can see on social media that people actually live pretty happy lives. That they’re given at least 20 days vacation per year (the legal EU minimum) as opposed to the usual five in America. That they’re able to attend university for free or next-to-nothing and start their careers without student debt. That they don’t need to worry about healthcare costs. That they can live comfortably without owning a car. That they enjoy social protections which guarantee them a good quality of life.
The opening of that window into what life is like in Europe seems to be making certain people in America (and their admirers in Britain) very defensive. But there is another, larger reason why these people are lashing out at the “europoors” in this defensive way right now. They can see that both Britain and America, once the envy of the world, have now become internationally renowned basket cases. Americans are now living with the knowledge that half their fellow citizens either support a Trump dictatorship or are indifferent to it. They are living with the anxiety that comes from living in a country that could, at any moment, slip into civil war. Brits, on the other hand, are living with the humiliations of Brexit’s effects on their economy and society. They have been reduced to a country with an Italian-style revolving door of prime ministers, the most recent former one reduced to hawking upside-down books on US cable news to anchors who don’t seem to even know who they are. This humiliation is a national trauma, there is no other way to describe it. And many are lashing out as a result. They’re defending the American horse they bet on in 2016, and feel the constant need to demonize and denigrate the EU horse they sold. And because the American media still gets so much of its knowledge about Europe via the biased British prism, the discourse in the US has become infected by the UK’s post-Brexit trauma.
To put it bluntly, 20 years ago Europe was an afterthought for Americans - an irrelevant Disneyland. That they are suddenly paying so much attention to it, even to denigrate it, shouldn’t get under our skin. It comes from a place of fragility, of psychological trauma. It is their problem, not ours.
Postscript
I know I said I wouldn’t get into a debate about the pros and cons of Europe and America, but I do want to say one thing about this “higher salaries” thing that I keep hearing Europeans talk about. Yes, net salaries in wealthy areas of the US are much higher than in wealthy areas of Europe, largely because of the drastically lower tax rate. But if you’re just comparing the headline figure, it’s giving you a misleading impression of people’s disposable income. Subtract from that monthly net the monthly healthcare co-pay even when you have insurance through your company (mine at my last US job was $400/month), your student loan repayments (mine are still $300/month), your car and fuel costs (New York City is the only place you can get by without a car), and various other costs that would be provided by the state in Europe such as childcare. And when it comes to those super-high salaries in New York City or Washington I keep seeing people talk about, go have a look at average rental prices in those cities and you might understand why my friends who live there have far far less disposable income than I do, even though on paper it might look like they’re making more.