In a typically funny column, Mark Steyn why Eurocrats misunderstand the United States and why, by implication, we should be heartened by yesterday’s E.U. vote in France.

Here’s a taste:

It would be more accurate to say almost all European nations subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are statist. Or, as Mr. Hutton has it, "the European tradition is much more mindful that men and women are social animals and that individual liberty is only one of a spectrum of values that generate a good society."

Precisely. And it’s the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to what Mr. Hutton calls "the primacy of society" that blighted the Continent for more than a century: Statism -- or "the primacy of society" -- is what fascism, Nazism, communism and now European Union all have in common.

In fairness, after the first three, European Union seems a comparatively benign strain of the disease -- not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivial pan-European laws that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy-bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government.

Read the whole thing.