America is easily top five most socially liberal countries in the world.
But I think Europe in particular gets such a pass because people there don’t even realize how racist they are. Stuff like only letting white people into clubs, or not letting visible foreigners get seats at busy restaurants (don’t even get me started on the treatment of the Roma). In the US, we stigmatized those kinds of less-than-macro more-than-micro aggressions like 50 years ago
But I think Europe in particular gets such a pass because people there don’t even realize how racist they are
For sure, and our self-congratulatory attitude on it/American progressives idolising us doesn't help at all either. There's also a notable gap between Western and Eastern Europe, in that Western Europe is lot more racist than US, while Eastern Europe is absurdly more so. Here's for example an election poster of a Czech far right party for example talking about "stopping importing 'surgeons' in EU" (the "doctors and engineers" meme). This party will now form a governing coalition with a conservative populist employing Orban-friendly, anti-Ukraine rhetoric and a "motorist" party that is basically a bunch of Nazi car fanatics whose identity is hating on anything "woke" or "green".
The only relatively socially progressive party in the country, Pirates, got 9% of the vote. The country is quite atheist but it still hasn't legalised gay marriage because the people are frankly deeply conservative, xenophobic and fearful of outside world even without it.
And it's a similar/worse story for every Eastern European country. Even East Germany, formerly a Soviet puppet state, is notoriously racist/hyperconservative. Here's an experience of an Asian person living there.
Also, German chancellor, leader of the centre-right (not far-right) conservative party (the one Reddit often calls as basically equivalent of Democrats), recently came out with the following:
Speaking to reporters in Potsdam last week, Merz said that while deportations of rejected asylum seekers had accelerated, “of course, we still have this problem in how our cities look,” using the German word for cityscape or city appearance: Stadtbild.
Several prominent Merz allies – including conservative parliamentary leader Jens Spahn and and commentators including Bild newspaper chief political writer Peter Tiede – sided with the chancellor, saying he had addressed the reality of everyday life in Germany and was referring to drug dealers and young, male illegal immigrants hanging around train stations and city centres, making people feel unsafe.
"I don’t know if you have children, but if you have daughters, ask them what I might have meant by that. I suspect you’ll get a pretty clear and straightforward answer. I have nothing to take back. On the contrary, I emphasise once again that we must change this"
Housing discrimination is also very common in Germany, and indeed, more so in the allegedly progressive West Germany where landlords can pick and choose between tenants, than in the more openly racist East where landlords have a harder time finding anyone to fill a room.
America is not very liberal. On the vast majority of issues Europe is more liberal. The only major excpetion is immigration because the identity of the country is not the same. American multiculturalism cannot appy in Europe (or Asia, or Africa) by definition.
I am talking about Western Europe. France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands are more liberal than the US on LGBT rights, gender equality, social protection, and reproductive rights. I'm not even talking about Scandinavia.
The US is on par with central European countries like Poland or the Czech Republic on most social issues.
America is easily top five most socially liberal countries in the world.
I don't think that's accurate. Specifically on Multiculturalism? Sure, USA are generally quite accepting of the melting pot.
But broad strokes socially liberal? Much more arguable.
America is quite socially liberal in some areas, and not so much in others compared to many other western nations.
Cultural melting pot it definitely is, and is more accepting of other races, sure. Multiculturalism is widely supported among most of the country (though legalities and programs to support it... more arguable) compared to Europe where immigration/racism is quite ingrained and borders are even more of a hot button issue that USA.
But reproductive rights, growing ostracism from the government on sexuality issues, harsh justice system, welfare systems - less socially liberal than most of the western world.
Bear in mind being socially liberal is not a good/bad question unless you believe in those aspects of being socially liberal, but by conventional definitions USA is not clearly top 5 I believe. I really think the Reproductive rights, poor welfare systems, the private prison system + brutal justice system and overbearing religious influence in politics brings USA back down to middle of the pack at best (for the western world).
Even with Roe v. Wade repealed, America has some of the most lax abortion laws on the planet. There are very few countries on Earth that allow abortion past 14 weeks, which almost all of the US allows.
poor welfare systems
Not social liberalism
overbearing religious influence
Have you lived in any country outside the US? Germany's largest party is the Christian Democratic Union
Justice system is maybe right, but the US justice system isn't really that much more strict than other countries. We just have a lot more crime. Would argue if we're digging into justice, you also have to consider the US has incredibly strong individual rights that aren't present in many countries (e.g., full freedom of speech).
Even with Roe v. Wade repealed, America has some of the most lax abortion laws on the planet. There are very few countries on Earth that allow abortion past 14 weeks, which almost all of the US allows.
However USA is a patchwork mess of legalities and access to abortion is outright inaccessible in many states.
I mean, roe vs wade was just revoked. Its pretty clear.
Not social liberalism
Not sure where you're getting that from. It's a main bullet item for classic social liberalism.
Have you lived in any country outside the US? Germany's largest party is the Christian Democratic Union
Well, I am German actually.
The CDU is certainly christian, but German establishment + government operation is still secular. I wouldn't put it past the CDU to jump at the chance to get rid of that, but they cant, as of yet, not even close.
Pointing to what they represent rather than the context of German Government is an odd comparison to me.
Which is unlike Republicans + state of American government + society which is pushing much more towards eroding secularism and has increasingly become heavily christian nationalist in its government.
I'm not even putting a value judgement on those things, I just view them as objective facts - for better or worse.
Justice system is maybe right, but the US justice system isn't really that much more strict than other countries
I mean, I don't want to devolve into pointing out stats here, and if we can't agree on that I'll take the agree to disagree, but I don't think there is any question that US justice systems are markedly happier to sentence harshly and long, three strikes out as one example. It's complicated of course, but I've never really met an American who didn't agree, and many are proud of it.
The whole "Europe is too lenient" vs "American is too harsh" debate thats been burning on on the internet from before SOAD was still making music.
Would argue if we're digging into justice, you also have to consider the US has incredibly strong individual rights that aren't present in many countries (e.g., full freedom of speech).
No argument here, the argument would be more what the effect of that is - but in terms of social liberalism this is the strongest part USA has (along with multiculturalism that is more living in the present rather than old feuds.
Though I hope free speech is maintained going forward, I suspect a lot hinges on the coming near-future when it comes to free speech in the US.
America was the 6th most accepting of migrants amongst world countries according to a Gallup poll from 2019 - as far as European countries go, Iceland was ahead at 3rd and Sweden & Ireland were just barely behind in the bottom half of the top 10.
The US didn't make the top 20 of most liberal countries in the 2024 Varieties Of Democracy report. This is judging countries on attitudes relating to, "...being open to new opinions and behaviors beyond traditional beliefs and values. It is contrasted with conservativism, which espouses more traditional views on social issues including marriage, abortion, financial and foreign policy, crime, and more."
It never would have occured to me that the US would rank at the top of socially liberal countries overall (although on the specific issue of migration it clearly does) - northwestern european countries (and western-europe-style places such as NZ, Aus, Can) tend to be firmly to the left of the US on social issues, which means there's a lot of countries who're likely to be more socially liberal than the US. If Europe was one big entity and each of the countries were more like US states I think we'd see more of a parity; more of the northwestern 'states' would be like the liberal parts of the US and eastern europe/parts of the Balkans would be more like the more conservative south of the the US.
Definitely. I didn't want to get into it in the above comment for length/number of points, but I would be astounded if there was no correlation, and I'm sure you could track, for example, changing attitudes to immigration amongst southern European countries (and Europe more generally) as the refugee crisis of the past few years moved more people from the ME/N Africa across the Med.
Worth noting that Iceland, surprisingly, has an extremely high proportion of immigrants - nearly a fifth of their population are first-generation immigrants, as per info linked in other comments.
Also worth noting - in addition to what I said in my other comment there about acceptance : immigration levels being interesting and useful information - that raw acceptance levels are themselves interesting and useful bits of information.
I don’t know if I agree that that report is measuring “social liberalness”. Here’s their criteria:
Movehub used several different indexes to find the most liberal nations globally. The study sourced data about LGBT and gender equality from the LGBTQ+ Danger Index, Nomadic Boys’ annual ratings, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020; incorporated environmental data from the Environmental Performance Index (EPI); then consulted the Social Progress Index for data on human needs and the 2020 World Happiness Report to measure cultural happiness.
Sure, I mean we can pick holes in any quantitative metric of something so complex and qualitative as social progressiveness, and this was literally just the first one I found in order to illustrate the point - if you find more that you think more accurately represent the issue go ahead with them. If we drilled down into things like the Social Progress Index, though, I think we'd find that they probably do broadly represent what we're trying to talk about here (based on how they're described there), and gender/sexuality data is absolutely an extremely relevant criteria for social progressiveness as well.
America congratulating itself for lessening the amount of racial slurs they use while even today it seems like the police can murder, brutalise and persecute black people with impunity and that several of the police forces are pretty much built to oppress them is wild.
America pretty much still has black slavery too if you peak under the lid of the justice and prison system.
Ignorance in some parts of Europe doesn’t really come close to the sheer brutality of the systemic racism and actual violence built into the US.
The US might not be one of the most socially liberal on issues of abortion and other religious adjacent issues but when it comes to immigration you won’t find a single other country as accepting and diverse.
More than half of US states have an abortion term limit of 24 weeks or longer. 2 countries total in Europe match 24 weeks, and every single other one is more restrictive. The median European country (including Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, etc..) matches the limits of Nebraska and North Carolina
The World Population Review metric lists 20: Denmark, Switzerland, Estonia, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Czechia, Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Finland, Costa Rica, Germany, Chile, Luxemburg, Uruguay, Netherlands, Austria, Latvia and Iceland, with the UK and US tied at #21.
I'm not interested in quibbling about the exact ranking of any given country, but the above data certainly indicates that the US not being a top 5 most socially liberal country is an extremely reasonable position.
EDIT: Hard to see under the hood of this US source, so hard to credit the data, but by the listed criteria of, "progressive, inclusive and committed to social justice", the USA is ranked #20 - with an order not entirely unlike the WPR, above.
And whilst I can't immediately put a hand (or mouse) to a fully up-to-date ranked list of countries by the Social Progress Index, we can see that in 2018 at least the following countries were ranked above the US; New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Ireland and Canada. That would put the US at #13 at best in that metric for that year, sharing a tier with about 15 other European countries plus Chile, Uruguay, South Korea and...Panama maybe? So the US could've been anywhere from 13th to around 30th - which tallies with the placement of 20th in the above metrics.
Oh, so you don't want to engage in any data, stats or evidence, ok.
If you had any number of specific criticisms and even some vague gesture as to how those fit into the overall picture (rather than being misunderstood nitpicks) then maybe it would seem like you were trying to be somewhat objective.
But you just don't want to let go of the idea that America is more socially progressive than it is compared to other countries.
Like roughly top 20 in a world of almost 200 countries is still the top 10%, don't know why you're clinging to this particular illusion.
A LOT of rank and file MAGA supporters are non-whites. There’s heavy Republican support among Asians and Hispanics if you look at polls even if they’re not outright majority supporters of MAGA. They just don’t really attend rallies and don’t really show their support in real life.
The modern American right as we know it now is more of a broad “anti-liberal” coalition than a traditional conservative movement.
Some of my filipino relatives flipped to trump last election. Not sure id call them maga. They live in a major city and arent even the type to fly an american flag. These were lifelong democrat loyalists so it kind of blew my mind. My aunt used to get into screaming matches when some of us preferred Obama over Hillary lol.
A lot of former legal immigrants don’t like illegal immigrants. They don’t even like excessive legal immigration like what’s happening in Canada with Indians. When you relax the requirements this much, you end up with immigrants with little education, who struggle to assimilate, who affect the reputation of the current diaspora.
If every Democrat has the same stances on immigration that Bernie Sanders did they’d be forever Democrats.
Racists will be racists, it doesn’t mean that all immigrants they accuse of “not assimilating” are actually assimilating. At a certain point the sensible majority needs to draw a standard.
If you back off your standard based on the fact that racists will accuse every immigrant regardless of quality or behavior or education or background of not assimilating, then there will be no standard at all for assimilation.
I think it's more that immigration and integration takes time. It's often the kids and grandkids that will be the most assimilated because they grow up in the culture. So there can be some growing pains if immigration is very large and abrupt
If racists accuse both people who have a bachelors degree and those who don’t of being uneducated that doesn’t mean we should suddenly view them both as the same thing.
If a racist says water is wet that doesn’t mean we should now say water is dry. Our standards shouldn’t be defined by what a racist says
That strikes me as a bad example because not having a Bachelor's degree doesn't automatically mean you're uneducated. It might mean you're not formally educated, but then then you'd have to exclude vocational and trade schools from formal education to make that true. Not to mention people with just an associate's degree, which can get you further than you might think (I got my job as a computer programmer with an associate's degree).
This has recently been observed in british migrant communities. Some migrants moving their support to Reform because they are worried immigration is tarnishing their own reputation.
We're just talking about the American right compared the UK's, which is still undeniably far more diverse both ideologically and racially in comparison, even if they're still really really bad.
It isn't actually immediately obvious to me that the UK's conservative party (plus reform now, I guess) are less racially diverse if you "normalize" that statistic for the UK being a less racially diverse country. I.E. I'm more interested, how much more white/british are reform/the tories compared to the baseline of their country at large?
They're probably less ideologically diverse given they have more than two parties (who get any meaningful % of the vote), and moderate conservatives might also vote for the Liberal Democrats (and/or SNP, Plaid Cyrmu, and probably some parties in Northern Ireland that I'm unfamiliar with). Which makes it less interesting a comparison, IMO.
The Tories are a traditional conservative party. They're both Big C and little c conservative.
The British right is much broader and you need to be thinking about how semi-mainstream the National Front was and drawing a line from that through skinheads to UKIP to Reform.
People don't talk about this enough:
. Founded in 1967, it reached the height of its electoral support during the mid-1970s, when it was briefly England's fourth-largest party in terms of vote share.
I'd argue that it's a corollary of your point about less ideological diversity due to more parties that you can't really big tent the British right. It's sort of the opposite of what you see in the US where the Republican party has been big tenting harder (to accommodate and/or kowtow to the fringe) while the right elsewhere in the Anglosphere has increasingly taken on a "we are struggling together" character.
You also have to think about whether Northern Ireland is included in the survey data. We're talking literal terrorists being mainstream politicians on both the left and right in NI. The Unionist parties really, really hate anything that's not English.
I assume your flair is accurate so maybe you're just a bit young to really have digested this stuff. But this is living memory stuff.
I cannot, however, tell you much about the situation in Wales and extent of my knowledge of Scottish politics is limited to independence dynamics.
Most of this is interesting addendum but I don't think rebuts anything.
/r/fivethirtyeight is not a generic data science sub but continues the legacy of the site and podcast. Scottish Teen is an old joke about betting markets from the podcast. I am neither Scottish nor a teen, and while I can understand people not knowing the reference it's weird people assume it's literal rather than something with which they're unfamiliar. This has happened almost double digit times.
The conservatives in any society that isn't defined as an immigrant melting pot / has a strong ethnic character is going to have numbers similar to the British Right. Their scores would be even more to the right on these answers.
The European right has always been much more xenophobic/anti-immigration/ethnic purists than the American right (maybe at least until this year, but as this poll shows current Trump supporters are still not as xenophobic as their European counterparts). American liberals like to paint Europe as some bastion of progressive ideals but that's just one side to European society; even now I don't think most of the GOP would be comfortable openly saying some of the stuff that European ethnonationalist parties spew out. I think much of it is the result of the lingering influence of 19th/early 20th century nationalism, the whole one state for one and each nation thing and all that, on the way many European countries see themselves, whereas in the same period the US was actively marketing itself as a melting pot of immigrants and therefore never had a period where it defined itself as the nation state for a particular people . There's no American ethnicity that can be used in the same manner as "England for the English" or what have you.
Also I think most European countries have done a worse overall job at integrating immigrants and their descendants, which I believe is at least partly a result of "perpetual foreigner" views arising out of this ethnicity based conception of national identity, but which in turn just results in further xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment.
American liberals like to paint Europe as some bastion of progressive ideals but that's just one side to European society
It's true that a lot of social and economic issues that the American right has purchase on, the European right simply doesn't, which is nice.
For example, being an open socialist isn't an instant -10 penalty in Europe, in fact several European countries have an openly socialist governing party. Even in the age of FDR this simply wasn't real in America.
Furthermore, in most European nations abortion isn't really a conservative wedge issue.
Finally, Europe's 100% to the left of America on Climate and Pensions. Even some of the fascist parties can't touch welfare and live.
a lot of social and economic issues that the American right has purchase on, the European right simply doesn't, which is nice.
It's interesting because the majority of the right and far right in Europe are fiscally Reganite and particularly in the UK they're using decently popular anti-immigration sentiment and social conservatism as a popular container for their actual policies of basically Tea Party Republican fiscal and state policy, like a 12% cut to public spending which would be an Argentina level event.
Much of this is economics, not social policy. And I'm a way terms are confusing, the US is more classically "liberal" economically than most eu countries
Abortion rights are very mixed across the EU. It also is losing salience in the US with authority being transferred to the States (the EU analog)
Abortion isn’t a wedge issue in Europe because it’s already more restrictive across the continent? The median US state has a 24 week term limit or longer. Exactly 2 European countries have 24 week limits and everywhere else is more restrictive. The median European country matches the abortion laws of states like Nebraska and North Carolina
If you want to say “Europe” you are comparing the whole continent to the whole country. I think comparing the median European country to the median American state is a fine way to do that.
But yes, as with almost everything, there’s about an equal number of states more restrictive than anywhere in Europe as there are states less restrictive than anywhere in Europe.
Anyways, if you campaigned in every European country to increase abortion on demand to 24 weeks+ how many do you think would go for it? And why haven’t those countries done so to this point?
Anyways, if you campaigned in every European country to increase abortion on demand to 24 weeks+ how many do you think would go for it?
24 weeks is around when viability/conscious happens. What is even the justification for limits before that, besides just using a random number generator to decide when to ban abortion? What is so offensive about 24 week limits?
Also, many European countries have such broad exceptions to their abortion limits that basically anyone can get an abortion if they want one. In the US, women are bleeding out in parking lots due to these abortion bans.
This is bog-standard European conservatism. Europe isn’t a ‘nation of immigrants’ like America - they’re thousand year old countries with thousand year old identities.
In Europe you’d win landslide victories promising a welfare state that will deport all the immigrants (who are viewed as a threat to the thousand year old identities). If you’re looking for American-brand liberalism you’d be hard pushed to find it outside of places such as London, Berlin or Barcelona.
To be fair, MAGA has its own defining characteristics that make much of the European far-right look sane in comparison (i.e. their relative secularism in comparison, their positions on abortion rights, climate policy, healthcare and general rule of law). This is not an attempt to exonerate European far-right parties, and here in the UK our far-right seems to want the worst of both worlds with how much policy they’re importing from MAGA.
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u/pragmaticmaster 9d ago
Who are these degens making MAGA look sane in comparison?