Slate - BOOM! "The Ugliest American"
Europeans secretly love Trump for confirming their own sense of superiority.
By Yascha Mounk
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_good_fight/2017/05/european_leaders_feel_smug_and_superior_to_trump_they_shouldn_t.html
The pictures from Donald Trump’s romp through Europe, which show a long parade of political and spiritual leaders looking visibly uncomfortable in his presence or even snickering to themselves as he spoke, make the point more forcefully than a thousand think pieces: Most Europeans are horrified by the president. They cannot stand his ignorance or his bellicosity, his plebeian manners or the constant bragging about his wealth. And yet, for all of their loudly proclaimed indignation, the barely concealed secret is that Trump makes them, well, happy.
In representing everything Europeans hate about America, Trump simultaneously confirms everything they want to believe about themselves. After all, Europeans have always looked down on Americans in the manner of a learned uncle who cannot conceal his jealousy at the banker nephew with that hot babe on his arm. In other words, they suffer from what psychologists call an inferiority superiority complex.
On the one hand, Europeans are deeply convinced that the world would be a much better place if only ghastly countries such as Iran, Zimbabwe, and the United States could be a little more like Germany or Sweden. This snobbism expresses itself in the arena of world politics: For example, Europeans tend to think that the world would be much safer if every country spent as little on its military as Denmark—conveniently forgetting that it was U.S. military might that kept their own continent peaceful for the past 70 years. But it also expresses itself in the realm of culture and cuisine: When an unsuspecting American friend dared to eat popcorn at a garden party held by my mother in Italy one summer, for example, five different guests walked up to her in quick succession. “American way of life,” each of them sneered.
This deep belief in the continent’s superiority makes it all the more infuriating that even the most patriotic of Europeans has to admit to its inferiority on a number of counts. There is that pesky little matter of the two world wars, of course. But the envy and the embarrassment go deeper than that: America is richer and more powerful. It is the world’s center for fashion and for science, for pop culture and for technological progress. The past may belong to Europe. But the future, it seemed for most of the postwar era, would undoubtedly belong to America.
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