In Tech Central Station, Ilya Shapiro writes that "Like the bedraggled patriarch in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who can't make sense of why his daughter would ever want to leave the fold, Europeans cannot for the love of Zeus understand why the world does not pay constant homage to their clear superiority":

This European descent has very little to do with growing anti-Americanism -- that is but a symptom -- and everything to do with the inability (and unwillingness) to grapple with the internal contradictions of the European economic and social models. Look at Europe's two latest political debacles, the EU constitution and last week's German election. French voters rejected the former because they feared it would force them to change their anachronous ways, while their German counterparts punished both a socialist chancellor who deigned propose modest reforms and a would-be successor who wanted the country's economic policies to make economic sense.

Shamefully, the European Union's constitution did not fail because citizens blanched at a retrenchment of sclerotic Eurocracy (quite the opposite). Appallingly, Gerhard Schröder's biggest losses were to the unreconstructed communists and other disaffected leftists -- for whom even the existing labor and tax laws are too "Anglo-American."

To repeat what has become an unfortunate cliché, Europe is dying -- literally (in terms of population) and figuratively (in terms of living standards, social cohesion, and economic growth). The United States meanwhile, while not without its own problems and pathologies, is prospering.

Robert Kagan identified the trans-Atlantic divergence in his prescient Of Paradise and Power, a sort of "America is from Mars, Europe is from Venus" approach to geopolitics. The United States sees itself as idealistic, man's last best hope for freedom -- a freedom worth fighting and dying for. Europe, pacifistic and cynical, wants nothing more than to conduct business as usual (under America's protective umbrella) -- and send diplomats to bargain with terrorists and tyrants.

The latest issue of American Enterprise magazine goes further, by detailing this rift at the socio-economic level in a series of stories on "Red America, Blue Europe." As Karl Zinsmeister shrewdly writes:

"The irony is that for all their insistence on portraying the U.S. as a land of fired workers, poverty, and economic insecurity, it is now Europe where unemployment is twice as high and four times as deep, where immigrants and the young have far fewer openings, where the ladder of upward mobility has fallen to pieces."