Unlike Any Other Place

Anyone who’s seen both the US and Western Europe knows that they are very different places, an ocean apart literally and figuratively. Andrew Sullivan, a Brit journalist who turned American points out the many, many differences. The first difference is the past v/s future looking tendency:

“(America) is often simply of an escape from the past into a country addicted to the future… Most nations, especially the England I knew, are defined by history, saturated in its remnants, places where one is never far from the echoes of those who have come before.”

That mindset extends into the individual level as well:

“(In America) Where you had come from was nowhere near as interesting as where you were going… (as opposed to) the way Europeans defined themselves by what they were rather than what they could become.”

This mindset may also explain why America is a melting pot:

“I wanted no group identity. I wanted — and I was utterly unconflicted and unembarrassed about this — assimilation.”

Then there’s the topic on which no country is comparable: immigration:

“There is simply no precedent in history for the sheer number of human beings who have recently come, legally and illegally, into America… At the same time, the composition of the wave has shifted profoundly… I was entering an America on the verge of a demographic revolution, as a white-majority country began its transition to becoming a white-minority one.”

While not perfect, the US is vastly better:

“I recognize not every immigrant here feels as welcomed, but I suspect they would be greeted with more hostility nearly anywhere else.”

Then there’s that thing the Americans worship: freedom of speech. Every other country ties itself into knots trying to balance free speech with “hurt” caused to others. America only draws the line if you incite violence against others; but any form of criticism is fair game.

There’s federalism, or the decentralization of power. A country whose paranoia of tyranny is reflected in its constitution:

“In America, by contrast, the dispersal of power was almost pathological — at least from a European point of view.”

Everything is egalitarian, or “a deference to nothing that smacked of the royal prerogatives that America had been founded to resist”:

“On the Mall, that sacred place of American iconography, there were no signs telling you not to walk on the grass; no fences or orderly lines as in the royal parks of London; no perfect lawn. In fact, Americans walked casually all over the place, played Frisbee where Europeans would fear to tread… I saw people clamber up onto the lap of Lincoln in the Memorial!... A monument belonged, quite simply, to the people. And no one else.”

It is also the home of capitalism and a profound dislike of big government:

“America truly represented the free-market, free-trade, international-­interventionist, and small-government ideology.”

And its citizens don’t hide their pride in their country:

“A mature patriotism is different from a blind infatuation.”

Not everything is better though (obviously):

“The obsession with gun ownership… The land of the free, I began to understand, was also the world leader in imprisonment… The first country to embed inalienable human freedom in its Constitution was also founded on the brutal enslavement of an entire race… It was a place of staggering wealth, yet it contained scenes of public destitution and poverty and decrepitude I’d never seen in Europe… It pioneered space travel, but its trains seemed relics of the early-20th century.”

All in all though, Sullivan says:

“America, in other words, is the country of both Obama and Trump, of the very best and the very worst, and its future is never settled but constantly remade, in often shocking and terrifying ways.”