“Anti-Europeanism has always been part of American exceptionalism, which defined itself in contrast to European history, politics, and society.”–Patrick Chamorel.
And, as the article that quotes him notes, Europeans hate the US, too. Although, I don’t think it’s as simple as: the European Nationalists hate the US, and the American nationalists hate them. Rather, I suspect that it is the Cosmopolitan outlook they have which looks down upon American Nationalism.
This is sort of odd, actually, because in general Nationalists hate all the other nations, and Cosmopolitans “praise, with enthusiastic tone… every country but their own.” and yet I have never gotten the sense that European animosity towards the US is animated by National Pride,Continental, or even Cultural Pride. The last thing I’d expect is for Cosmopolitans to hate some other country’s Nationalists. Yet, I think that’s happening here. From the same article:
“‘They [the Europeans] are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, sometimes anti-Semitic and often anti-American appeasers,’ Garton Ash wrote of America’s implicit disdain for its allies. Social trends seem to constantly reinforce that opinion. Rising secularism and spreading, ultraliberal social attitudes in Europe contrast ever more sharply with a perceived new American Puritanism.”
Strange.