Americans have a deepseated belief that the best way to arrive at a result is to allow everyone to compete as hard as they can for the result they desire, and see what emerges. We figure that the more someone wants something, the harder they'll try to get it; the closer a thesis is to the truth, the more people will be convinced by it; and the more talented someone is, the better the outcome they're likey to generate.

Thus, our legal system is based on lawyers arguing their client's case as jealously as they can; our economy is based on turning people loose to fend for themselves however they can; and our political system is based on letting two parties raise as much money as they possibly can and buy zillions of TV ads to denounce the other side in the most scurrilous terms possible.

Sometimes, this approach works. But sometimes, it doesn't. Sometimes, a neutral arbiter judging the facts and trying to be objective does a much better job than self-interested advocates slamming away against each other. For example:

It does not seem that the best way to decide whether Mohammed Zarouias is a terrorist or not is for the prosecution to claim that he is Hitler, his defense to claim that he is Mother Theresa, and the decision to come down somewhere in between.

And it does not seem that allowing each political party to rig the system by scandalously redrawing the map to its own advantage whenever it's in power is the best way to achieve a fair electoral system.

A neutral board of arbiters, with a mandate to draw up a voting map after each new census that maximizes physical contiguity, keeps self-described communities together, and doesn't overly segment minority populations in ways that dilute their voting power, would be a vastly superior system.

But here in America, we don't believe in neutral boards of arbiters. Unless, of course, it's something really important, like money. For that, we have the Federal Reserve. But redistricting - that's just democracy. Who cares about that?

In Francis Fukuyama's review in Slate of Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept", he quotes Bawer as follows:

Europeans … will allow immigrants into their country; they'll pay high taxes so that their government can dole out (forever, if necessary) rent support, child benefits. … But they won't really think of them as being Norwegian or Dutch. And they'll rebel mightily against the idea of immigrants living among them as respected, fully equal professionals.

This might seem true, except that the large wave of Indonesian immigrants who arrived in Holland in the 40s and 50s was completely and unproblematically assimilated; they're never even mentioned when debates on immigrants come up, let alone debates on Muslims.

The same holds for the generation of Yugoslavian refugees who found asylum in Holland in the 90s and the occasional assortment of Iraqi and Colombian political refugees one encounters in Dutch circles. Antilleans and Surinamese are a more complicated case, but certainly are far less segregated from mainstream Dutch society than Muslims, and are unambiguously claimed as Dutch due to their colonial heritage.

Holland's problems aren't with "immigrants"; they're with Turkish and Moroccan immigrants. In fact, they're almost exclusively with the Moroccans. While Moroccan immigrants and their children constitute less than 2% of Holland's population, young Moroccan males make up over 40% of the prison population.

What's happening in Holland is basically that a workable model of immigration and assimilation has been broken by immigrants from one particular background. It may be broadly true that supporting immigrants with social safety nets and isolating them in government-subsidized housing is a poor strategy for integration. But it's misleading and far too easy to broadly claim that "Dutch people don't accept immigrants as truly Dutch". (They certainly accept the Somalian Ayaan Hirsi Ali as truly Dutch. For that matter, the quintessential Dutch everyman pop star, Andre Hazes, was the son of a Spanish guest worker.)

It's not that the Dutch refuse to accept immigrants as Dutch; it's simply that they set the social bar much higher. What they've found is untenable in recent years is the oxymoron of a '68 leftist egalitarian multicultural ethic, and an actually existing insular society in which one must learn the language fluently and master a set of demanding social cues and habits in order to be accepted as "one of us". On the other hand, the American model of assimilation is so wide-open that it can only work effectively in the new colonial nations. It's fine for the US, Argentina, Australia or other current or former immigration magnets to be free and easy about identity issues, but in countries with long-settled characters and complex internal social contracts, the US model is not applicable.

Another part of the US model that's extremely hard to envision adapting to Holland is the sink-or-swim socioeconomic attitude towards new immigrants: find a job, support yourself, go get 'em and good luck. This is a great way of forcing new immigrants to commit to American society, but in Europe, it would mean either doing away with the social contract with the poor (neither likely nor desirable) or discriminating against immigrants. Some discrimination might be a good way of demanding a social commitment from immigrants, but it can't be taken to American-style extremes.

What Holland (and by inference other European nations) is going to have to do, and what it is doing, is to both make a more active effort to reach out to immigrant communities and bring them into the mainstream, and simultaneously to make stronger and more explicit demands of assimilation on immigrants. But it's not useful to accuse Dutch of refusing to accept immigrants as professionals or equals (indeed, many examples point to the opposite: it's ONLY the highly educated and professional immigrants who are quickly accepted as truly Dutch). And it's only marginally useful to suggest that Europeans adopt the American model of instant assimilation based on a "creed". The creeds, in fact, are developing; the Dutch are in an intensive ten-year period of figuring out what exactly their country stands for again. But we should not be surprised when those creeds turn out to demand a lot more social participation than the American one does - and to include things like accepting gay marriage. Fukuyama decries such a measure which has been introduced in a German state because he thinks it's designed to exclude Muslims. Maybe the measure is designed to exclude Muslims, or fundamentalist ones, anyway. Guess what? If we're going to be demanding assimilation, some exclusion is going to come along with it.

Here's an incredibly irritating fake equivalency on the abortion battle, from Newsweek:

The question of abortion is much more ambiguous than the louder voices on either side of the pro-life/pro-choice divide are willing to admit. The hard-line anti-abortion crusaders may be disappointed by the legal realities, at least in the short term. At the same time, the pro-abortion-rights interest groups are just beginning to grapple with an uncomfortable truth: that many of the million-odd women who have abortions every year are deeply troubled, if not guilt-ridden.

What the hell is this supposed to mean? Many of the millions of men who have affairs every year are deeply troubled, if not guilt-ridden, too. Does that mean legislatures should be allowed to criminalize adultery? How is the fact that many women feel bad about having abortions a relevant counterpoint to "the legal realities" which are going to disappoint anti-abortion crusaders? How is it even relevant to the discussion? Is the law now in the business of making sure people don't feel sad or guilty?

This "women feel sad after abortions" meme has been catapulted into the media by conservative anti-abortion forces, and it's infuriating that otherwise intelligent people actually think it's relevant to the question of whether abortion should be legal or not. There are a lot of choices I've made in my life that I feel bad about; none, however, that I feel ought to be criminalized. This being, you know, my life.