We are the Euroweenies We've Been Waiting For

“A European’s Warning to America” is proffered by EU parliamentarian Daniel Hannan:

On a U.S. talk-radio show recently, I was asked what I thought about the notion that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya. “Pah!” I replied. “Your president was plainly born in Brussels.” American conservatives have struggled to press the president’s policies into a meaningful narrative. Is he a socialist? No, at least not in the sense of wanting the state to own key industries. Is he a straightforward New Deal big spender, in the model of FDR and LBJ? Not exactly.

My guess is that, if anything, Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do. He would say he wants a fairer America, a more tolerant America, a less arrogant America, a more engaged America. When you prize away the cliché, what these phrases amount to are higher taxes, less patriotism, a bigger role for state bureaucracies, and a transfer of sovereignty to global institutions.

He is not pursuing a set of random initiatives but a program of comprehensive Europeanization: European health care, European welfare, European carbon taxes, European day care, European college education, even a European foreign policy, based on engagement with supranational technocracies, nuclear disarmament and a reluctance to deploy forces overseas.

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As Obama or his ghostwriter famously noted in his autobiography, “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” No wonder academia, the MSM and the rest of the bike path left went crazy over him, when his continental worldview so perfectly mirrors their own.

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