Now, the story of humanism and fascism, as great poles of a divide in modern thinking, is also the story of America and Europe. Europe became the first great humanist society, the first real humanist project. That’s not just metaphorical — it’s very real. The thinking behind modern Europe, the EU, is that every life deserves to live with dignity and respect and self-determination. Everyone should have the basics. That is because the great minds who inspired it — from Sartre to Camus — to those who built it— were and are all great humanists. Humanism: every life should have dignity, love, care, nurturance, for the terrible suffering and sorrow it must endure, simply for existing at all, and facing death, time, dust, grief. That is how Europe’s expansive social contracts of healthcare and education and retirement for all were born — and how their miracle, producing the highest living standards in history, ever, period, in just one human lifetime, from the ashes of war, happened.