Even the Daily Mail seems to have caught the habit. Comparisons, comparisons. If you want something (in the Mail's case, a tax structure helping family life) then you look to Europe. They've got it. Why are we on the outside, looking in? They've got better pensions/health-spending/education standards/public transport. Surely we can have whatever we happen to want, too?
It seems the most reasonable of requests, the most seductive of arguments. And it works for everybody - Eurosceptics as well as Europhiles. So Johnny Foreigner is "backing the family"; it must be a doddle for Johnny Bull? But the trouble with the comparison game is that you can't play it on issues à la carte. One in, all in. You are, inevitably, talking about the nature of your society.
Come with me to a society where the game barely exists. I haven't heard a single American politician this convention season openly cite any area of domestic policy for which any example from overseas practice holds promise for the United States. The rest of the world, for such purposes, might as well not exist. The "dream" (in theory, at least) is essentially insular, self-contained.
Yet there is a wider pattern. Two of America's best political scientists - Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks - have just published a book called It Didn't Happen Here (the "It" being any beachhead for socialism or social democracy in the land of the free). Maybe the reasons are too complex to rivet Tony Blair to his holiday deckchair: but the results laid out at the close are fascinating.
Lipset and Marks have collected the statistics of the 90s charting the fundamental differences of structure and attitude between developed nations. They're broadbrush, and some will have shifted a little over the years. But they still - as laid out here - tell the story.
Take trade-union contracts with employees (for wage and other bargaining purposes). Just 18% of American workers fall into this net - against 95% in Finland and 90% in France. Britain, at 47% and sliding, is the least union-contract-bound nation in the European Union.
Take total tax receipts as a percentage of GDP. The US (though it perpetually moans about high taxes) is at 28.5%. Britain, at 36%, is the nearest to it of any major EU country. And when you take the percentage of that money used for expenditure on social security programmes, then Britain again (at 15%) is the lowest EU spender, the one closest to America's 13%.
Inequality? No western democracy (once you include tax and transfer payments in the standard reckoning called the Gini coefficient) is less equal than the US - with a sustained rise in economic inequality throughout the 80s and 90s. But guess who's the star runner-up, with a starker Gini rise over that same period? Britain dutifully trod the American path step by step.
And the poverty figures, unsurprisingly, cut exactly the same way. On relative poverty (the percentage of population living on less than 40% of the median income in each country) we are comfortably top of the big EU league: at 5.3%, as against Germany's 2.4%. The statistics for absolute poverty are equally bleak.
In sum, when economic commentators talk about Britain following the US and not the European financial cycle (so that joining the euro is a perennially dodgy enterprise) they include more than stocks, shares and inflation rates. Our cycles are different because our societies are different. Forget island nations and proud heritages and all that stuff. The facts tell a different tale. We are the least European society in the EU: we are the nearest our side of the Atlantic offers to the following American way.
Now, as Lipset and Marks say, there's constant flux. European governments are having to squeeze familiar traces of social democracy out of their systems. Market economies operate to perceived global rules. Everything is getting closer together. But the assumptions in those changing societies don't move nearly as fast.
Where do we stand? Uncertainly betwixt and between. We are America's best chum on earth, the first country to take any president's side in a jam. We service Washington's intelligence gatherers. We shall (just watch!) help bring in the national missile defences that - in its apostolic imaginings - turn America into a vast gated community. We are slavish devotees of export Hollywood.
Yet a great, and more subtle, divide remains. Our policies may increasingly shadow America's - even to the point of pressing them on European allies. But our attitudes are far more in tune with our EU colleagues. If your tame pollster asks Americans whether they agree "that large income differences are needed for a country's prosperity", then roughly a third of the population say yes - as opposed to under a quarter of Europeans. And Britain doesn't hang out at the end nearest to the US position. We're slap in the middle of European opinion.
Ask, equally, whether it is "the government's responsibility" to take care of very poor people who can't take care of themselves" and only 23% of Americans agree - as opposed to 57% of Britons (exactly the same as the Dutch). At most salient points - government involvement in economic affairs, public job creation, the length of the working week, even mandatory wearing of seat belts - there's a sharp contrast between American hostility towards what's ordained from on high, and Euro/Brit enthusiasm. Gordon Brown's last Budget, full of the usual tinkerings as well as largesse, would have got a resounding thumbs down on Capitol Hill
It isn't just the obvious things that set us apart - the guns on the street and the long queues on death row. The plain fact about our Britain, Blair's Britain at the start of the new millennium, is that we really are adrift, stuck somewhere in mid-Atlantic. We think of ourselves as a bridge of understanding, able to explain one side to the other. But I truly wonder about that. I wonder about an identity that doesn't match attitudes, policies or gut beliefs.
At the heart of Europe? The leaked memos of summer show us where Mr Blair stands, backbone straight, lips murmuring. The debate at home is still rooted far away from that, trapped by the assumption that there is a distinctively British way - another third way. But when I hear George W Bush promise tax rates of no more than 33%, I wonder whether there's any such choice.
Within all the usual global limits, we need friends and models who reflect our own instincts. And if Europe can manage that - sweet, siren song - then why can't we?
• It Didn't Happen Here, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, is published by Norton at $26.95.
