The Real News Network has the video interview Romney and the European Authoritarian Right with John Weeks.

John Weeks: European right-wing governments prefer Obama for pragmatic reasons, but are closer to Romney in ideology
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The U.S. Federal Reserve has put a lot of money into the various bailout funds for the euro. Okay. I think that the European governments believe that—the right-wing governments believe that Romney would be less likely to do that. So even though they may prefer Romney in terms of his social and economic policies, they’re interested in continued support from the Federal Reserve system. And after all, the sad part of it is Obama has not been that progressive. So he’s not that far from some of these governments. I mean, that is the—that’s what’s fundamentally under attack by the right wing in the United States and Europe, the idea that people can come together to solve a problem.

This interview explains to me why it is that Europe is turning rightward. I was fooled by the post World War II history into thinking that the United States was leading Europe away from Europe’s social democratic tendency.