09-23-2017 (Photo: File:Angela Merkel 2008 Rust.JPG) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow

Order-obsessed Germany aims to overtake liberty-obsessed US as the world's leading democracy. Russell Berman @HooverInst

In these brief comments, I am likely to err on the side of excessive schematization: the positions I want to tease out of several texts deserve more nuance and differentiation than I can provide in this short text. Yet the binary character of the analysis is also a reflection of the highly polarized public debate, certainly in the United States but also in Western Europe, in the wake of various political developments, above all the 2016 election that led to the Donald Trump presidency.

A good piece of the transatlantic sniping between Washington and Berlin is, of course, just a function of electoral politics. Merkel faces the Bundestag elections in September, and she can secure her by now likely victory by displaying her distance from Trump. But something deeper is going on, beyond the personalities of Trump and Merkel: alternative traditions and expectations regarding government. The United States and Germany do indeed represent different political cultures, and these differences are reflected in contrasting constitutional languages, as we will see below. In terms of political culture, from a German point of view, Americans are excessively individualistic: one could document this with accounts such as Thomas Mann’s in his 1922 speech on “the German Republic,” a foundational statement for the Weimar era, but also in surveys of political values. Meanwhile from an American point of view, Germans are excessively conformist, authoritarian, and obedient. Undersocialized loners on the one hand, pliable crowds on the other, Americans versus Germans: this is the stuff regrettable stereotypes are made of, but these images are also pertinent to constitutional structures—liberty versus fraternity—as the following high-velocity itinerary will suggest, from foundational eighteenth-century documents to recent political speech.

http://www.telospress.com/who-leads-the-west-and-why-trump-or-merkel-constitutional-cultures-in-the-united-states-and-germany/