everything looks perfect from far away

The more vulnerable that Europeans feel, the more liable they are to shift blame across the Atlantic. The strength of disdain is a measure of Europe’s weakness. Smugness is one of Europe’s great contemporary exports. We may all think that we know America, its music, its culture, its self-confident exceptionalism. We tend to forget that Americans fight only with extreme reluctance. We overlook their penchant for agonised self-criticism; everything bad we know about the US, we know because Americans inexhaustibly rehearse their society’s shortcomings. There has never been greater transparency, whether on the battlefield or the boondocks, and there has never been more open debate about the country’s virtues and vices–the internet has transformed the quantity and, at times, the quality of the conversation.