Macroeconomic strength is famously … let’s say “only tenuously correlated” with things like quality of life, social mobility, household-level economic stability, and lots of other aspects of social welfare (e.g. education, health risks and access to treatment, sustainable demographic trends and infrastructure practices).

I’m not saying Europe is automatically better on those axes, but even the least charitable assessments have it very competitive with the US on several.

All of which is to say: “well if our politics are so backwards how come we have so much economic/military power?” is a structurally useless question to ask, because those things are not correlates the way people think they are. It’s like asking “if your car is so much safer than mine, how come mine is so much faster?”