Just curious if you could expand on what your opinion is of what the divide is between Europeans (especially Germans) and America and/or respond to my observations in the comment above.

Well, I should say that I have been living here the vast majority of my life; I never lived in Germany as an adult, though I do have contact with a number of family members and try to follow public opinion a little bit. I was just late in deciding to pursue U.S. citizenship. Let’s put it this way – I received my green card in 1976, at the age of five.

Anyway, in response to your comments, I do think you have it pretty much right. This 93-7 thing is stretching it a bit, but you can imagine that the distortions regarding Mitt Romney in the German media, which it seems to me is as left-leaning as ours, are even more severe since there is significantly less information overall. Plus, I believe it is true that the average European’s sense of political center is rather different than ours, for a variety of reasons. It’s easy to make American conservatism look scary, because it is literally quite foreign to them. I think people can love and admire America and carry an internal assumption that conservatives are somehow not a part of what makes America lovable, in which they are obviously wrong, but it takes someone who is willing to dig past the surface to realize that.

That said, talking to Germans doesn’t seem too different from talking to Californians in my experience. You get all types, with a dominant note of socialistic impulses.

To sum up, there is a slightly dissonant but understandable duality. Germans have an innate cultural tendency to believe they know the way things ought to be done and will be very outspoken if you are doing it differently. So a lot of them, particularly on the subject of American foreign policy, come across as believing themselves to be vastly superior. In many ways, however, it is clear when talking to them that they in fact believe American culture to be superior to their own and they believe in American greatness. America, after all, has had a profound and extremely generous and protective influence on creating modern Germany. I imagine it would be different in France.

It just makes me glad that I am no longer a German citizen but American since 2005. Although I’m less glad than I was a week ago.

Xasprtr on November 10, 2012 at 8:19 PM

Welcome to America! Always glad to have people like you here!

Just curious if you could expand on what your opinion is of what the divide is between Europeans (especially Germans) and America and/or respond to my observations in the comment above.

Second, before you get all hissy over the first comment, no I’m not a troll, I’m a regular poster at HotAir and a staunch conservative as a short Google search of HotAir would reveal. Stay calm.

Third (and my actual point), having lived in several countries in Europe I can say that there is a certain schadenfreudig sentiment that most Europeans have for America, they also have a great deal of respect for America as well which seems to be greater than just the normal platitudes that you get from someone when you tell them that you’re an American. I never really expected it to be 93-7 for Obama in Germany. In Germany the CDU, now the majority party, isn’t all that bad from a conservative perspective and some days I would take the FDP there over our Republican Party. And for the Germans at least, they are sincere in their disagreement with Guantanamo, torture, & drones; it’s a genuine reaction to their past, not a way to score political points like it is with the Democrats. Apart from the legitimately meant items I mentioned above, they probably just have the same problem as us: The Media.

And finally, for a bonus, for anyone looking into the reasons why Europeans dislike America, I would recommend Anti-Americanism by Jean Francois Revel. Although I haven’t read it myself, I have heard good things about it, and I have read several books by Revel, a former French Marxist turned (classical) liberal, which I can’t recommend enough. His Last Exit to Utopia is highly intellectual but also witty and easy to digest and read with a revealing take on the history of post-Soviet leftism in Europe.

Yeah, I wonder too about their reaction if their borders were flooded with illegal uneducated, low skill immigrants who dont speak German and aren’t of an Arian complexion. I don’t think they’d, uhhh, be very warmly received.

The Count on November 10, 2012 at 7:32 PM

They have been flooded with radical muslims, mostly from Turkey and aren’t too happy about it.

Alllah Snackbarrrrrrrrrrrrr

That they can have such big mouths, superiority complexes, etc., safely protected by US treasure/blood, entirely escapes the Dummkopfs.

Schadenfreude on November 10, 2012 at 7:13 PM

Yeah, I wonder too about their reaction if their borders were flooded with illegal uneducated, low skill immigrants who dont speak German and aren’t of an Arian complexion. I don’t think they’d, uhhh, be very warmly received.

It escapes them also that Der Spiegel, a leftist paper, is owned by a billionaire female conservative American woman.