He's Old Enough To Know What's Right

Mark Steyn has an excellent piece at National Review Online on why we should be especially thankful to be Americans. He also addresses one of the myths about Europe that has bothered me for a long time:

But Americans aren't novelty junkies on the important things. "The New World" is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree "the Old World" can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative.

The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent's governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of "the west'"s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they're so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas--Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you're going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

The idea that we have much to learn from the Europeans--at least politically speaking--because their history goes back so much further than ours has always struck me as absurd. Yes, the peoples, cities, buildings, etc. of the various European countries have been around a long time. But in many cases their democratic forms of government are actually quite new and, in the cases of Germany and Italy, the formal existence of the nation itself (in terms of unification) came well after the United States.

When it comes to continuity of a freely-elected constitutional government, most of Europe has nothing on the United States. That is just another one of the many things we should be very thankful for.