The cliché is that polarisation, extreme inequality and fake news et cetera are problems plaguing the west. In fact, they are, above all, problems plaguing the US. Whereas western Europe just has a bad cold, the US has caught influenza (with Donald Trump as a symptom, not the cause). The US now probably resembles Brazil or Argentina more than it does Germany or Spain. The one western European country that shares much of the US’s dysfunction is the UK, but even it probably won’t produce a Trump. Here’s why the US is far more unstable than western Europe:
Inequality is much worse in the US. The country’s Gini coefficient after taxes and transfers (a good measure of inequality) is 0.394, higher than anywhere in western Europe, according to the OECD. The only western European country that approaches US inequality is Britain, as witness the disaster at London’s Grenfell tower block in wealthy Kensington. The UK also (unusually for Europe) has less social mobility than the US. [...]
The US is a plutocracy to a degree unimaginable in western Europe. One reason Republicans are trying to strip healthcare from about 22 million people despite a probable electoral backlash is to please Americans for Prosperity, the political vehicle of the billionaire Koch brothers. [...]
Western Europe’s media landscape is also less polarised than America’s, says the Reuters Institute’s recent Digital News Report. Most European countries have major media that are trusted by both rightists and leftists. These can be boring state broadcasters, or the Ansa news agency in Italy, or Germany’s centrist mass media, says the report. Consequently, few western Europeans inhabit ideological “filter bubbles”.
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