https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/the_europeans_keep_rejecting_liberty.html
Modern continental Europe keeps trying to solve its political problem — and then to impose its solution on everyone within reach. Recognizing this historical process can help us understand European anti-Americanism, strongest perhaps in Germany. America created the Europeans’ political predicament, and we keep preventing them from adopting the solutions they come up with.
America created the Europeans’ political problem by the magnificent example of the American Revolution and the astonishing, world-changing success of America. In an interesting version of the story of the emperor’s new clothes, rule by hereditary monarchs, hereditary aristocracies, and established churches was suddenly revealed to be absurd and indefensible.
The only problem was that continental Europe was for the most part incapable of self-rule. The attempts, for example, by Germany, Italy, and France to achieve reasonably stable regimes of rule by their own people would be comical but for the terrible human consequences of their repeated failures.
With the exception of the Netherlands and a few other European countries that, like Britain, have achieved rule by their own people, the modern history of continental Europe is the story of people trying various experiments in an ongoing effort to relieve themselves of the burden of self-rule.
For a while, it seemed certain that fascism was going to be the European solution. The Germans and the Italians took the lead, but there were at the same time homegrown fascist movements throughout Europe, even in Britain. The French earned from Homer Simpson the sobriquet “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” because of their feeble resistance to the Nazi invaders and their swift adoption of a policy of collaboration with their Nazi rulers. If it weren’t for America’s military intervention, the Nazis would likely have defeated Britain, and fascist Europe would have reached from Ireland’s western shore to Moscow and beyond.