Europeans have been conditioned by centuries of servitude to the state to accept the dictates of the state and whatever crumbs the state chooses to leave to the people.”
- I agree, to some extent.
Americans are, by tradition, more hostile to the ideas of ‘big governments’ than Europeans. But Europeans rebel a lot, although especially in Western Europe the wrong kind of people often rebel for the wrong reasons. Just look at Socialists and French farmers.
The Eastern Europeans, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate to overthrow their despotic governments recently and I hope they’ve still got much of that spirit left.
One reason many ordinary Europeans might put too much of trust in strong governments is the fact that alliances between common people and a strong ruler (often a monarch) was the only way of counteracting the ambitions of the nobility in history, together with the fact that strong leadership often was needed in times of war.