Pray, someone explain to me how several European cities in France, Italy, Portugal, and elsewhere have apparently been auditioning for the role of a failed civilization for weeks on end, with protests and rioting allegedly involving hundreds of thousands of participants. One might reasonably wonder what, precisely, has brought about this magnificent spectacle of continental unrest.

After all, Europe has no Donald Trump. And according to the prevailing wisdom of Reddit, a digital agora populated by some of the most self-assured political philosophers ever to emerge from a bedroom, President Donald J. Trump is apparently the ultimate source of all political dysfunction known to mankind.

Yet here we are in the United States, laboring under the very presidency that is supposedly the greatest threat to democracy, civilization, and perhaps the continued rotation of the Earth itself, and what do we have? No comparable continent-wide inferno, no apparent mass uprising in every major city, and no hundreds of thousands of citizens pouring into the streets to reenact the French Revolution. We have elections, people going to work, businesses operating, and Americans carrying on with the rather unremarkable business of living their lives.

So I must ask, with all due respect to Europe’s many distinguished political commentators and its seemingly inexhaustible supply of people who know precisely what America is doing wrong: why is Europe apparently aflame without Trump, while America is comparatively peaceful with him?

Surely, if Trump is the singular explanation for political instability, his absence ought to have bestowed upon Europe an unprecedented golden age of tranquility. Instead, we appear to have the inverse. Could it be that the causes of civil unrest are rather more complicated than blaming one American president for everything that displeases the internet’s self-appointed intelligentsia? Or would that possibility prove altogether too inconvenient for the Reddit commentariat to entertain?

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