By DENIS BOYLES [Claremont Review of Books] – American exceptionalism, invented or real, has an exceptional usefulness for those tilters in need of a windmill. For a century or so, French, German, Italian, British, and Spanish politicians have all exploited anti-Americanism as a way of distracting voters from failed economic policies and doomed social experiments, just as European philosophers and writers have built careers pointing out American shortcomings from a European point of view, often in personal terms: Americans are fat, racist, uncaring, unfair, violent planetary polluters—all the myths Baldwin seeks to destroy. When Americans have written critically of Europe (and I’m one who has), it has been to point out the consequences of bad policies, especially foreign ones, and rampant hypocrisy. It will be forever before a person of African descent is elected to govern a European democracy, but to Europeans of a certain class and persuasion, American moral inferiority is simply assumed—something everybody just knows. “Today the U.S. is the most unequal of all the world’s developed nations in terms of income and wealth distribution,” a British professor of American Studies wrote, reviewing Hodgson’s book in the Times Literary Supplement. He was apparently citing himself, but may have used Gini coefficients from a 1999-2004 Luxembourg Income Study cited by Baldwin. According to that study, the U.K. is only the smallest fraction off the U.S. numbers for wealth distribution. But if the data from these studies are averaged over the decades 1970-1990, the U.S. actually lags behind countries such as France and Ireland, and the data show that income equality in the U.K. has risen rapidly recently, while the U.S figures are relatively static.

The fact is no matter what variations in domestic policies politicians invent, no matter what rhetorical claims of convenience are cited by polemicists, no matter what books we read, what schools we attend, what cars we drive, what taxes we pay—when it comes to outcomes, we all end up at about the same place at about the same time.

Continued at The Claremont Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.