Lincoln Chafee stepped into the Presidential race Wednesday with his plan to “wage peace.” A central tenet of his World Peace campaign: “Let’s join the rest of the world and go metric!”
Chafee’s metric advocacy may seem to come out of nowhere, but it actually springs from a well that runs deep in the heart of American liberals and the Democratic Party. It comes from deep-seated wish that America — the country most American liberals truly do love — was more like Denmark and Belgium.
Chafee said our switch from ounces to centiliters would be “a bold embrace of internationalism,” a way to “join the rest of the world.”
In what way has America not embraced internationalism?
The U.S. spends more on foreign aid than any other country. We are so involved in the rest of the world you could say we’re meddlesome: Regime changes here, funding rebels there; propping up rulers here, leading peace negotiations there; food aid, AIDS relief funding, etc.
We have 46 million immigrants, according to United Nations figures — more than the next five countries combined. The U.S. is a leading member in basically every international body — the United Nations (headquartered in New York), the WTO, the World Bank (headquartered in D.C.), the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
We even have a representative on FIFA’s Executive Committee. Heck, our Justice Department is cleaning up the crippling corruption at FIFA even though Americans don’t care about soccer.
Sounds to me like we’ve already “join[ed] the rest of the world.” We’re actually the annoying over-involved member of “the rest of the world” club.
Chafee’s speech also focused on the Iraq War, which he cast as an example of “American Unilateralism.” (In asserting that only the U.S. supported this war, Chafee forgot Poland … and the United Kingdom, and dozens of other countries.)
But why did Chafee not say a word about Obama and Hillary Clinton’s attack on Libya? Just like Iraq, Libya was an ill-considered regime change that increased instability, left a leadership vacuum, and created a terrorist breeding ground in the Muslim world. Unlike Bush and Iraq, Obama and Clinton didn’t have legal authority from Congress to invade.
Why is Libya okay by Chafee? Is it just because France was on our side?
So, no, Chafee’s vision of America isn’t an America more involved in the world. It’s an America that stops acting like it’s so special. It’s an America that’s more like Europe.
We should be more like Europe is actually a fairly typical argument from Democratic politicians over the past few decades.
Liberal writers and Democratic politicians constantly begin sentences with phrases like “The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that …” And they intend theses sentences as criticisms.
Mike Dukakis, John Kerry, Al Gore — they all campaigned on making the U.S. more like Europe: Let’s fund more high-speed rail, regulate more heavily, centralize government power, and conduct more industrial policy.
In recent years, you’ve seen campus liberals wishing Americans were more moderate on freedom of speech, like the French and the Germans, who aren’t afraid sometimes to slap on muzzles when their subjects get a bit mouthy.
But Chafee perhaps hasn’t noticed that let’s be more like Europe isn’t a winning a political message.
He could take some hints from President Obama, who cleverly found a way to package the same Euro-envy in star-spangled rhetoric. When it comes to corporatist industrial policy, Obama doesn’t simply say, “Germany and France have the right approach to economic policy.” Obama instead talks as if he’s the captain of Team U.S.A. in the corporate welfare Olympics.
“If we stand on the sidelines,” Obama said at an annual conference for the Export-Import Bank, “while they [China and Germany] go after those customers, we’ll lose out on the chance to create the good jobs our workers need right here at home. That’s why standing on the sidelines is not what we intend to do. … We need to up our game.”
Obama talks this way the most about green energy. His substance is: we should subsidize windmills as much as the Spanish do. But his message is: We can’t let the Spanish beat us in the race to build windmills.
Chafee isn’t so subtle in expressing his shame that we’re not Europe. He’s that Middlebury student who rides the Eurorail over Spring Break with a Canadian flag sewn onto his backpack. If he hadn’t been born into a political family, Chafee would probably be typing out explainers at Vox that Americans eat their meals the wrong way, and explaining in some Columbia Heights backyard why soccer, with its upwards counting gameclock and a scoreboard that puts the home team first, does it right.
That viewpoint is popular in many parts of the country. But Americans, as a whole, don’t want an America that is more like Europe. We want an America that is more like America.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
