One of the most insidious habits of the current commentariat is to foment hysteria about the decline of democracy or rise of fascism or descent into tyranny in on the basis of attributes that the US share with most other modern democracies...
🧵
🧵
...including those that these same hysterics about the American context profess to admire.
Indeed, the vast amount of media/academic hyperbole has been directed at policies, proposals, or cultural feature that fall well within the normal range of ‘democracies.’
Indeed, the vast amount of media/academic hyperbole has been directed at policies, proposals, or cultural feature that fall well within the normal range of ‘democracies.’
My own view is that as the years go by America is becoming less ‘exceptional’, for good and ill. We remain a distinctive species, to be sure, but in almost all those areas which provoke the most unhinged rhetoric, we sit comfortably within the genus of 21C Western democracies.
Giving the misleading impression that the US is uniquely bad is no more intellectually honest – and a lot more civically corrosive – than the childish jingoistic American exceptionalism with which I grew up, according to which freedom was the sole property of Americans.
Let’s limit ourselves here to our European counterparts on a few hot-button issues.
In particular, many “right-wing” proposals and policies align more with European norms than do “left-wing” policies and outlooks.
In particular, many “right-wing” proposals and policies align more with European norms than do “left-wing” policies and outlooks.
To start with abortion. The US under Roe was genuinely a massive outlier. While we will now have red states with more restrictive laws than most of our peer nations, blue states will continue to go well beyond the standard European level of abortion permissiveness.
It is a range of purple states, who settle in effect on a legalization in the first trimester but heavy restrictions thereafter, who will most approximate the present democratic standard.
We will have a strange pattern of legal variation btw states, at least for a while, but after Roe we will be closer to the European standard than we were before on average. Moreover, American *attitudes about abortion are quite in line with Euro norms.
apnews.com
apnews.com
Don’t let Macron’s hyperventilation about the Dobbs decision fool you: France has a more restrictive abortion regime than blue-state America by a wide margin.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
And the Supreme Court of Germany – the nation I’m often told is a leader in democratic govt – considers abortion to be in violation of the Constitution’s commitment to human dignity. What tyranny! What anti-democracy!
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Legal restrictions on abortion that the US media and Democratic Party memeplex would consider unvarnished hateful patriarchy continue in Germany now.
But on this front both Germany and the pre-Roe US were exceptions in seeing abortion as a *constitutional issue at all. In taking the matter out of the domain of constitutional right, the recent SC decision made us more like other democracies.
To shift to another case where the refrain that democracy was out and fascism ascendant was constantly heard: the voting reform bills of last year, esp. in Georgia.
Not only were these laws not generally more ‘restrictive’ than the current legislation in several blue states, but they remained less demanding than the voter ID laws that prevail throughout Europe.
dailysignal.com
dailysignal.com
If you can believe it, several Euro democracies are so worried about electoral fraud that postal voting is highly curtailed or totally off the table. Yet they persist in calling themselves democracies, rather than the odious tyrannies they are! The gall.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Likewise, we hear constant griping about “minority rule.” Setting aside the underlying conceptual problems with the argument that the senate/electoral college are ‘biased’ against dems, it’s inaccurate to think that the American constitutional order is uniquely frustrating...
...of nationwide numerical electoral majorities.
Countermajoritarian institutions abound, for better or worse (mostly for the latter imo) in nearly every democracy on the Continent.
#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank" rel="noopener" onclick="event.stopPropagation()">books.google.fr
Countermajoritarian institutions abound, for better or worse (mostly for the latter imo) in nearly every democracy on the Continent.
#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank" rel="noopener" onclick="event.stopPropagation()">books.google.fr
Center-left political scientists have even considered postwar European govts so countermajoritarian that they creates such terms as 'constrained democratic administrative statehood' to impress the degree of suspicion of popular majorities their structures reflected.
Not only is there a broad trend toward judicialization and the enhancement of the powers of constitutional courts (again, a trend I look upon with mistrust), which by its nature involves cabining in the realm of majority decision, but:
If you can believe it, the UK Prime Minister hasn’t represented a party that won 50% of the vote in a general election since the 1930s; only in the coalition govt of 2010 could the executive be accurately said to have earned a *majority of the parliamentary vote....
...Shocking that we allow them a place in the family of nations. (Then again, when a majority verdict was clearly given directly on an issue of national importance, that was also condemned as a near fatal-blow to democracy. Damned if you do…)
The party of the just recently resigned Israeli PM received 5% of the vote! In general, proportionalist PR systems often yield heads of the executive branch whose democratic credentials for the office are questionable.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Take three other issues where the Left is constantly hitting the right in hyperbolic fashion.
Covid: Despite Euro's heavy lockdowns, I would argue that on average FL has been more in line with the Euro norm than blue states. Desantis's resistance to vaccinating children, determination to keep schools open, & clear move to a post-covid era in 2022...
...more closely reflect Euro practice. The Biden admin and Blue-state approach, and the bien-pensant world's strong & continuing emphasis on social sanctioning & decentralized shaming of those who don’t ‘take covid seriously’, is rather out of step with the Euro norms.
Or take the immigration hysteria during the Trump era & the ceaseless din of open borders rhetoric. The US is distinct in its permissiveness toward illegal immigration, and in its acceptance of family-based, non-skilled migration it is more welcoming than most democracies.
Most democracies make it hard to immigrate legally & deter illegal immigration with considerable prejudice. There was callous incompetence, of course, but the overall effect of a Trumpian immigration program would have been to make us more closely resemble Europe on this issue.
Indeed, since Merkel’s spectacular 2015 open door policy, the EU has battened down the hatches, and it even pays the autocatic Turkish regime to keep migrants from reaching its borders. swp-berlin.org
More generally, the most social-democratic nations in Europe have taken a dim view of immigration and appear to be returning to that historical norm.
Shifting ground: The current human rights issue crusade of the American left, which has been dubbed central aspect to democratic legitimacy by many, circulate around trans issues, and in particular around gender-affirming care of trans kids.
Europe, however, is adopting the opposite tack, and tending toward a policy of caution in handling gender dysphoria.
wesleyyang.substack.com
wesleyyang.substack.com
How astonishing that our voguish gender crusades have not been taken up across the West! We say they are human rights, after all. Leading experts even tell us that “anti-trans” sentiment is the gateway to fascism!
Lastly, a related lament: that America, given its greater religiosity, stinginess of maternity leave, more toxic masculinity, etc. is a female-unfriendly patriarchy. And yet US women are more professionally integrated and successful than are Euro women. americanactionforum.org
Of course, just because European countries do X doesn’t mean X is right. But surely it should slow down the intellectual-emotional progression from ‘I don’t like X’ to ‘if X come about we know longer live in a decent/ democratic society.’
All of this information is just, you know, googleable. It is genuinely bad faith and lazy to constantly harp on America’s descent into some kind of illegitimacy without acknowledging the policies and institutions of our peer nations would have similarly to be reviled.
Intellectual integrity demands that one either give up on this ill-founded apocalyptic version of American exceptionalism, or grasp the nettle and declare most modern democratic governments illegitimate/tyrannical/ fascist too.
Is the latter really something that our cosmpolitan ‘liberal norms’ crowd wants to do? Are not reasonableness and sobriety in judgment 'liberal' values?
There are, naturally, some areas where American govt/culture, and the preferences of the US “right” specifically, are genuine outliers, e.g. guns. But where we are the greatest outlier of all, I suspect, is in our all-engulfing governmental & corporate “civil rights” machinery.
Where we are aggressively headed away from the cosmopolitan norm, it is, I fear, the postliberal progressives and their bureaucratic-legal apparatus that is dragging us there.
The end. Sorry for the long spiel.
The end. Sorry for the long spiel.
*sorry for the typos.
Loading suggestions...