Europeans Are Rethinking America

@#1 ... I remember a time back in the '60s where one would find their bucolic European backpack travels had less hassles if you told everyone you were Canadian. ...

Well, yeah.

From what I've heard, that's always been true.

But the point of this thread seems to be that Europe's overall view of America is deteriorating. Not that the Europeans may have had a better view of Canada back then.

Yeah, Canadians may have been subject to less hassles when visiting Europe in the 60's. Those were interesting times. (understatement).

For example ...

Germany Issues Travel Safety Warning Against the U.S.: 'Be Vigilant'
people.com

... Germany is issuing new guidance to its citizens planning to travel to the United States amid ongoing protests with immigration officials.

On Monday, Jan. 26, Germany's Federal Foreign Office updated its U.S. "Travel and Safety Advice" page on its website to include new warnings about ongoing events that could impact travel plans.

One of the warnings includes "demonstration/clashes" with immigration officials.

"In Minneapolis and other cities, demonstrations sometimes lead to violent clashes with immigration and security authorities," the guidance says. ...

@#7 ... The civilized world needs to smack the US in its dcnk. ...

Here's a commentary that has caught my attention ...

www.youtube.com

Transcript...

transcripts.cnn.com

...
ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and other MAGA luminaries often proclaim that the grave danger facing the West is civilizational erasure, which they claim is happening in Europe. Through its dangerous and misguided approach toward identity and immigration, Europe is destroying the West's distinctive legacy.

But the West's defining character has not been tribal or religious solidarity. That describes most of the world. The West's precious, almost unique achievement has been the limitation of state power. Since Magna Carta in 1215, the West gradually placed constraints on rulers through rights for citizens, independent courts, or sovereign church, and the sanctity of private property. That inheritance is what made the West democratic and prosperous. It's

also what made it stable. Citizens could dissent, businesses could invest, and civil society could flourish because power was bounded by law.

The second Trump administration has moved sharply to erode these traditions. In Minneapolis, two people exercising their First Amendment rights were shot dead. There and elsewhere, federal officers have been operating masked, often in unmarked vehicles, making arrests without judicial warrants. The optics and the felt reality are of authoritarian policing. State power that is unbounded.

And it's more than optics. This administration has used its powers in stunningly aggressive ways, often slow-walking its obedience of court rulings, delaying them so much as to be sometimes defying them de facto.

The Trump administration has declared war on civil society, media, universities, non-governmental organizations, law firms, and even private businesses. The Justice Department's plans to investigate organizations like George Soros' Open Society Foundations, with the president describing it as racketeering, signaled something dark.

The criminalization of disfavored groups. It is the logic of Hungary and Russia imported into American politics. You don't rebut critics, you investigate them.

Then there's the legal profession. When the government threatens law firms through security clearances, access to federal buildings, and the insinuation that representing the wrong client carries consequences, it's telling the country quietly but unmistakably the protections of due process are conditional if you choose a firm that the state does not like.

Universities too have been frontally attacked and investigated on an unprecedented scale.

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[10:05:01]

You do not have to love the modern American university to see the danger here. The state is using funding to compel political concessions from independent institutions.

The press, always the early warning system of a free society, has faced what can only be described as relentless intimidation. Media outlets are sued and regulatory powers used publicly in an apparent attempt to coerce owners to toe the party line. In August, a federal judge found that the Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission investigation into the left-wing group Media Matters likely violated the group's First Amendment rights and looked like political retaliation, not neutral regulation.

The administration is expanding state power within the economy. Less is a rule setter than as a deal maker and disciplinarian. There's a world of difference between industrial policy that works through published criteria and competitive grants, and a system where CEOs are summoned to the White House, punished, rewarded or encouraged to comply.

When regulators hint that routine approvals, renewals or reviews may depend on whether companies adopt or abandon certain policies, capitalism stops being a competitive arena and starts resembling a patronage system.

And then hovering over all of this is the administration's appetite for using security state tools not on extremists, but on dissidents. Consider the push to designate some antifa groups as foreign terrorist organizations, a concept so vague and ill-defined that even national security experts warned it could become a catchall.

Under existing law, knowingly providing material support for a designated foreign terrorist organization can carry up to 20 years in prison, and support can be construed broadly enough to include trivial assistance. That is how democracies decay, not by announcing that dissent is illegal, but by reclassifying dissent as something else.

The administration talks about the West as if it were a heritage museum, symbols, slogans, identity. But the West's real genius is institutional, law that binds all, the strong and the weak. Liberty protected not by benevolent leaders, but by constrained ones. A civil society robust enough to oppose the state without fearing that opposition will be treated as a criminal act.

The West is not a bloodline. It is a bargain. Power constrained, rights protected, coercion accountable. The greatest threat to the West is not that it is becoming too tolerant or too concerned about individual rights. It is the expansion of state power making the West just like every other society in history where the strong rule the weak.

When seen in that light, we can say plainly that civilizational erasure is indeed happening. But it's not in Europe. It is here where the American government grows comfortable with unbounded power and the country grows accustomed to living with it. ...