Eurocope

I recently attended the excellent Kilkenomics festival in Kilkenny, Ireland. If you ever get the chance to go, I recommend it. Putting comedians and economists on the same stage doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but it’s surprisingly effective; they balance each other out quite well. And Ireland is a wonderful country, of course.

But I did notice one thing at the festival that made me a little sad. Since I’m American, the festival organizers stuck me on two panels about the United States — one about the economy, the other about Trump and politics. All throughout those panels, the comedians made jokes at America’s expense — how Americans don’t have health care, how everyone is poor, how guns and violence are everywhere, and so on. The crowd ate it up. But whereas in the past this would have felt like friendly teasing, now it felt strained and a little desperate.

Europeans have good reason to be mad at the United States right now. Donald Trump has scaled back U.S. aid to Ukraine, cut military aid to the Baltic states, expressed friendship and sympathy for Russia, and in general has done lots of things to indicate that the transatlantic alliance isn’t as firm as it used to be. Trump has slapped tariffs on Europe for no good reason, and has threatened much worse. And Trump’s vice president and other MAGA figures have demonstrated an unhealthy obsession with European immigration.

After all of that, it’s natural for Europeans to want to fire back. And compared to what Trump is doing, jokes about American health care and guns are pretty weak tea.

But at the same time, this catechism of America’s supposed problems often feels like a type of cope — a way that Europeans can avoid confronting their region’s own challenges by telling themselves that “Well, America is worse!”. In fact, I often encounter this same list of criticisms on Twitter, and in casual conversation with Europeans. It includes the following claims:

• Americans don’t have health care

• America is a poverty-ridden, deeply unequal country with no social safety net

• American politics is dominated by rich plutocrats

• Americans are uneducated

• America is full of guns and violence

One problem with this litany is that most of it isn’t true; some of these problems were always exaggerated, and many of them have been effectively addressed since the