The European Union and its leaders face a persistent difficulty in correctly understanding American politics and society, committing what the article calls a "recurring European misreading of America." This analytical failure is not a new phenomenon, but a historical tendency that repeats itself over the decades.
The concept of "return to normalcy," frequently invoked by European bureaucracies, proves problematic when applied to the North American political context. European leaders tend to interpret periods of greater political tension in the United States as passing anomalies that should be corrected, rather than recognizing the structural forces that fuel them.
The article argues that this European desire is equivalent to asking elected American politicians to govern against the priorities of their own electoral bases. This implicit demand ignores the democratic nature of the American system, where elected representatives are obligated to respond to the aspirations of the citizens who elected them.
The so-called European "diplomacy of nostalgia" thus fails to recognize that political transformations in the United States frequently reflect profound changes in American society, and cannot simply be reversed by external pressure or by appeals to an idealized past.
