Moore hints at -- of course -- a conspiracy to try to keep us from liking the French for fear that we too will develop a taste for the good life on the government's dime. Unfortunately for Moore, it's worse than that. America has a deep-seated individualistic value system that, coupled with the lack of European-style class conflict, inhibited the rise of social democracy here. As one historian has put it, if you were to set out to design a society hostile to collectivism, "one could not have done much better than to implement the social development that has, mostly unplanned, constituted America."
This exceptionalism has its downsides -- our high rates of violence, for one -- but it also has created a extraordinarily dynamic and open society that can adjust to and thrive in the globalized economy in a way that sclerotic social democracies can't. Just as Moore is apotheosizing France, its people took to the polls in near-record numbers to elect a reformist president devoted to making them work harder and weaning them from cushy benefits. In this sense, Michael Moore is more French than the French.
He hails the street protests that engulf France every time the government threatens to take away some benefit. We don't match the French in demonstrations, but once established, our government programs are just as fiercely defended. Liberals agitate for more government programs knowing that they create their own self-perpetuating constituencies and chip away at our culture of self-reliance. For now, that culture is still robust, as American exceptionalism remains stubbornly exceptional.
If you really want sweeping French-style social-welfare programs and repressive tax rates, your only alternative is to, like the American expats Moore glorifies in his movie, move to France.