The end of American Exception? We’ll all be Frenchmen in spirit? A UK immigrant hopes not
During PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer last Friday, the program’s resident pundits, David Brooks and Mark Shields, had an interesting exchange about President Obama’s first budget. They agreed that the administration aimed to be “transformative” — and Brooks conceded, “I think we all want that.” The real question, he said, is how transformative.
Brooks: “The debate will be over the nature of it. If it’s a transformative relationship that basically keeps the American model with repair, you’ll get a lot of people in the center for it. If it’s a transformative relationship that turns us into France, with a consumption tax and a much bigger federal government, you will not.”
Shields: “That’s a straw man, turning it into France. That’s not the case.”
Is it really a straw man? I was hoping that Brooks would press Shields to say what exactly it is about France he objects to, what makes him recoil at the parallel. Where has France gone too far, in the view of an American liberal?