Michael Moore’s grand European tour

THIS week sees the release of a fine hour-long documentary on social policies in Europe, and what America could learn from them. Sadly, this short film is wrapped in an hour-and-fifty-minute-long one, the other 50 minutes of which is Michael Moore making an ugly American of himself. The provocative film-maker’s “Where To Invade Next” (released in Britain on June 10th) is quite amused with its own premise: Mr Moore is “invited” to the Pentagon, where the brass tell him, in a voiceover of Mr Moore’s own, “we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.” They “send” Mr Moore to “invade” new countries, looking not for oil but for ideas for making America a more civilised place.

What he finds in Europe is, indeed, remarkable to Mr Moore’s faux-naïf eyes. Italians get six weeks’ of paid leave, plus various other holidays and allowances. The chief executive of Ducati, a luxury motorcycle-maker, says he is proud to give his workers living wages, decent conditions and time off. A working-class couple tells Mr Moore how they spend their long holidays, before he tells them that no federal law in America requires any paid holiday at all.

Each country in turn has something that Mr Moore will pretend to be flabbergasted at. France serves nutritious, delicious school lunches complete with a cheese course even in a poor rural school. (Cut to unidentifiable fried brown rubbish on a Styrofoam tray in an American school.) Finnish kids top education league-tables despite a child-centred approach and little homework. (America prefers cramming for standardised tests, and falls at place #29 in international rankings.) Slovenia has excellent and free universities. (Several American students have decamped to Ljubljana to escape student debt at home.) Portugal has decriminalised all drugs. (Mr Moore toys with two cops: “I have half a pound of cocaine in my pocket right now.” They sit stone-faced.)

The most powerful moments of the film concern American violence, and Europe’s rejection of everything from its fascist past to armed police. In Germany, he listens as a teacher explains the Holocaust. America, he says, has refused to truly accept responsibility for slavery and its shameful treatment of Native Americans. Norway experienced a violent massacre in 2011 by a racist fanatic, Anders Breivik, but the vast majority of Norwegians, including a father of one of the victims, refuse to countenance the death penalty. An otherworldly segment tours Norwegian prisons with flat-screen TVs, game consoles and unarmed guards. These are contrasted with brutal shots of prison-guard beatings in America, where disturbingly many black men are on the wrong end of the baton. Norway’s focus is on rehabilitation not revenge, and it seems to work: Norway’s recidivism rate is far lower than America’s.

Mr Moore’s subjects are eloquent defenders of Europe’s ways. A comparison of the proudest features of European life with the roughest edges of America could, in defter hands, convince a few Americans to re-think their country. But nearly each segment features some howler or absurdity, usually out of the film-maker’s own mouth. Quizzing the father of Mr Breivik’s victim in Norway, he asks why Norway didn’t respond to the massacre as America did after September 11th, 2001—as if a lone-wolf shooting was the same as a conspiracy by a well-funded international terrorist network with a state haven. In Finland, Mr Moore lets an American expat teacher tell him that in America, schools are “corporations making money”. This is nonsense; of America’s 58.3m school pupils, 463,000 (0.8%) go to a for-profit public school.

Mr Moore says Americans with their mindlessly long work hours are hardly more productive than Italians with their vacations. It’s hard to tell if this is intentionally misleading or ignorant: America’s GDP per head is $55,000 to Italy’s $35,000; Mr Moore probably means hourly productivity per worker, which in Italy is boosted by the fact that many of its less productive citizens are not in any kind of work: 57% of work-aged Italians are employed, against 67% of Americans. Fewer workers working fewer hours at the same average productivity rate produce less GDP.

The underlying point is a good one: Europeans are happy with their work-leisure balance, and stunned by America’s stingy policies. And working longer hours means working more unproductive ones; there’s a diminishing marginal return to extra time at the office or factory. Many Americans might trade a bit of GDP for a bit of life. But Mr Moore refuses to discuss any of these things in the language of trade-offs and downsides. He says he’s in Europe to “pick the flowers, not the weeds”, which conveniently means ignoring stagnant growth, high unemployment and rising right-wing populism.

Some smug left-wingers will admire “Where to Invade Next”, but they are already convinced anyway. Middle Americans who see the film will recoil at seeing their country reduced to a place where the devil drags the hindmost to a violent, racist hell. Near the end, Mr Moore asks an Icelander to tell Americans what she really thinks of their country, telling her specifically not to hold anything back. She pauses, frowns, and says “I would never want to live in the States, even if you paid me.” It’s certainly true that Americans don’t hear enough about the good sides of European life. But if dour Nordic finger-wagging is the kind of thing Mr Moore thinks will convert an American voter, he understands his own country even less than he does Europe.