Who Is More "American"? Those in the German government or the American one?
As we face several more weeks of ludicrously irresponsible hostage-taking politics driven by Tea Party radicalism, we’d do well to study how postwar Germany — yes, encouraged by the United States — has embraced the sort of consensual, problem-solving politics for which we were once famous.
The funny thing is that this moderate form of progressive, bring-people-together politics was what the United States and its allies had in mind for Germany when they worked with German leaders, especially Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, to create a post-Nazi state. The goal was to avoid the extremism and polarization that destroyed the pre-World War II Weimar Republic and led to Hitler’s seizure of power.
“The Germans don’t buy the zero-sum thinking that government and markets — or liberty and equality — can’t be pursued jointly,” added Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. “They argue about the same issues we face — how much social, how much market and how much government do we want? — but their starting point is that all three should be working together: capitalism with a strong welfare dimension steered by a government which is an ally, not the enemy.”
But the fact is that countries learn from each other. Germans applied to their own best traditions some useful pointers about reaching workable compromises in a democracy from us – from the America of FDR, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Why do Germans remember ideas from our history that we Americans seem determined to forget?
http://www.nationalmemo.com/who-is-more-american/
It is ironic that Germany's governing philosophy is a product of the efforts of FDR (postwar planning prior to his death), then implemented by Truman and Eisenhower. The Germans have retained the idea that "capitalism with strong social protections" works and "government which is an ally, not the enemy," while too many of our politicians have forgotten that.