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I have just returned from a three-week visit in a different Europe than the one currently caricatured in America’s culture wars, one that deserves consideration from America’s left and right alike. The small villages in southern Germany, central Switzerland, and western Austria to which I traveled showed little evidence of the libertine Europe admired by liberal Americans and condemned by American conservatives. Instead, I was mightily impressed by the strength of communal bonds, the presence of local cultures and distinctiveness, the persistence of tradition and memory, a culture of saving (in every sense of the word), and a strong work ethic aimed at preserving a high degree of independence.

Though far from the centers of influence, these regions seem to me as worthy of being considered as “European” as those cosmopolitan centers that most often attract our attention. Here, towns are towns: houses are generally not permitted outside the town limits due to strict zoning laws that have kept American-style suburbanization at bay. Small proprietors still dominate the economies of these villages: zoning laws that discourage the building of strip malls, coupled with closing times for shops that give advantages to family-run businesses, have both helped local businesses to stay competitive with lower-cost chains.

Higher energy costs in Europe have also discouraged American-style automobile culture from taking hold here. Roughly half the cost of gas comes in the form of an energy tax (a gallon costs roughly twice what one pays in the United States), and electricity is comparably expensive. The Europeans I have seen are light years ahead of America in energy conservation, and will better weather the storm of rising energy costs. Indeed, the combination of vibrant local economies, nearby productive farmland, viable public transportation and widespread use of alternative energies points to a culture that has never abandoned sustainable communities in the way that America willfully and woefully has done over the past fifty years. The last laugh will be Europe’s, I think, when the permanently rising costs of energy force America into an even more expensive retooling of our heavily oil-dependent lifestyles, and small towns like the ones I recently visited will be able to go on in the same way as they always have.

In a revealing moment, my father-in-law pointed to the solar panels and the wood piles and the gardens and the compost heaps in his small German village and told me that they were conservative—meaning that they represented the effort to conserve the goods of life, to preserve a community that can sustain itself, and to pass on a cultural inheritance that has been bestowed upon them. In America, it is our liberals who praise the freedoms in Europe, while overlooking the conservative impulse of its self-restraint. Meanwhile, our conservatives condemn the statism of Europe without understanding that efforts to conserve—to be conservative—require government support to combat the tendencies of markets to produce waste and undermine thrift. Americans of both the left and right have lost the ability to perceive a form of liberty that is achieved through restraint. Both see something in Europe to praise or to blame, but both fundamentally overlook a Europe that may present a challenge to their presuppositions. Both ignore—perhaps at their peril—another and truer alternative for America to consider.

Patrick J. Deneen is Director of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy and Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He blogs at What I Saw in America.


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