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If you look at the US political spectrum through a lens of economics and authoritarianism, both parties do look pretty far right compared to most of Europe: European-level levels of tax and social benefits are well outside your Overton window, most pro-corporate policies like Citizens United and the DMCA have strong bipartisan support, both parties are in favour of prison terms and conditions that would make the eyes of Europeans water, and both parties are in favour of foreign interventions and maintaining the size of your military-industrial apparatus.
In Europe, support for US-style business-friendly policies exists but generally feels pretty artificial (backed by politicians recognized to be US plants and understood as the cost of doing business with the US), US levels of taxation and benefits are not backed by any serious party, US-style punishment is sometimes advocated for particular cases by tabloids but I have not seen it as a general platform, and support for militarization has only noticeably crept up since about 2014 (Ukraine) or perhaps 2016 (Trump's first term).
What do you mean by ‘authoritarianism’? From my POV as an American I am much freer than a typical European, because Europeans don’t have any of the bill of rights. I have protections from search and seizure, protections in my speech and religious expression(and my religion is genuinely unpopular among some segments of society, which are disproportionately elite segments), can own a gun(although I get the sense that in large chunks of Europe I could own a gun with significantly more paperwork- still, not having to pay for a gun club membership because that’s what France requires is a benefit), and have expansive rights to defend myself and my property against criminals(which Europe drastically limits). That’s before getting into parental rights, or other merely customary legal differences.
The UK has more people in legal trouble over speech than Russia; these are not merely theoretical differences.
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I watched non-authoritarian Europe beating elderly people bloody when they protested against strict lockdown policies. And then I watch as they imprison thousands for rather mundane political speech on social media platforms.
Is there a single party in all of Europe who supports free speech as a principle? Or gun rights? Or religious freedom? Or education freedom? What about one which didn't wholesale endorse vast totalitarianism over its population and lock them indoors for over a year in some places?
As far as I can tell, this sort of frame is impervious to any experience. I regularly see boomers in the US talk about their guns being important if authoritarianism ever really showed up and yet they were few and far between when US sheriffs were arresting priests for holding church services, an act which has been constitutionally protected conduct at the federal and state level for hundreds of years.
It's like a security blanket: at some point in the future, when "authoritarianism" happens, they'll be ready. Just like we still have Europeans who are ready to criticize the "authoritarianism" of the US while they cheered police beating the elderly for violating totalitarian public health mandates for years. Surely. they'll also oppose it when "authoritarianism" ever makes it to the shores of the old continent.
What does "authoritarianism" even mean if it doesn't include the years of ridiculous behavior during the covid hysteria? Europeans will cheer authoritarianism whenever they think they need it to accomplish their bureaucratic meddling in every part of life and it's mostly by chance it hasn't more often. Europeans don't have militaries because they're satropies of the United States and expect its military's protection. If they thought they needed it, we would see vans going street by street and kidnapping military aged males just like we see it in Ukraine. And I bet I would still see Europeans talking about "authoritarian" United States, as opposed to Europe.
You raise a good point that it's at least not so clear-cut regarding authoritarianism, because each side weighs and interprets the freedoms they have or don't so differently. Through my Euro eyes, US prison terms and the circumstance (responding more to @Hieronymus's point) that police turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand weigh a lot more than the right to have guns (especially considering that the possibility of me having guns in the US is what creates the near-necessity of police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building), or that the US has some more arcane rules that may restrict when and what police can search a wee bit more. Our absence of "education"/"religious freedom" reads as freedom from the ability of having one's life ruined by crazy parents. I will grant the superiority of the US free speech principle, but that flags me as an unusual European; most people would say that things such as a "right to be forgotten" and protections against libel and slander actually make the individual more free from the tyranny of the masses.
On COVID, neither side has made a good showing, but I actually get the sense that the intensity of the response in Europe was nontrivially fuelled by imported TDS.
It's really hard to communicate to Europeans just how manipulated their perspective on America really is because their news sources are typically worse, at least with respect to American news, than the worst of American media. I admit my experience is rather limited to a couple years in a few Western European counties, but their media is like if a person with MSNBC proclivities and bias only watched MSNBC for all their news and then crafted it for a European audience. Many of the worst things about American society is imported to Europe through this process. Perhaps that is unfair for the rest of Europe. My friends and their experience are also confined to those places. For e.g.,
Without looking it up, how many people do you think are shot by police in the US, a country of 330,000,000?
Without looking it up, how many times do you think police engage in "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building"?
For Europeans I've had this discussion with, they vastly overestimate this by multiple magnitudes. Americans also vastly overestimate these things, but not as badly. Both are the result of the journalist class who are simply awful, but Americans have real life experience which serves as an anchor to prevent believing more ridiculous things. Or at least that's how I've rationalized the difference.
I don't think there is much for either of us to convince the other w/re policing; my experience with European police is rather limited and my experience with American police is extensive. In general, I find American police to be more friendly and less aggressive, but that may be the perspective of a foreigner/native in both situations.
As you said, Europeans and Americans have very different perspectives. Americans would characterize this as state ownership of children and very authoritarian. Individuals being prohibited the ability to act on the world and forcing them to outsource it to the state is authoritarian. Addressing every societal ill from the perspective of the bureaucratic state is authoritarian, but it a common European perspective.
When Europeans call America authoritarian, it comes off as preposterous to us. Putting people in jail for mild social criticism is nuts and authoritarian and has nothing to do with "libel and slander." It's a fundamental antipathy for individuals' ability to speak their thoughts into the world. Americans react in disgust to state censorship, Europeans broadly agree with it. There is a long list of ways Europeans act far more authoritarian than Americans and expect obedience as part of their culture.
Beyond these differing perspectives, we can see which society is "authoritarian" based on how they respond and enable state policy. Covid gave us a frontrow seat:
Having lived in the worst places in the US and their covid hysteria at least part of the time, it was still never as bad as places like the UK, Spain, Germany, or Italy, and not as long either. Neither side made a good showing, but Europe was worse and more authoritarian in pretty much every aspect with the lone country of Sweden being significantly different and getting ridiculed for being right the entire time.
It's hard for me to swallow the "Europeans aren't authoritarian like the US argument, look at how their police behave" when we saw how Europe behaved when significant portions of their populations didn't obey. Authoritarian cults don't look authoritarian when all their members go along with their dictates, the authoritarianism only becomes evident when people don't.
Unfortunately looked this up already in the context of the argument earlier, I think it was 600.
I would guess significantly more - if we make it something well-defined like SWAT dispatches, perhaps on the order of 100k? Is that data collected anywhere or is it another thing where you could only find local data and not everywhere due to how fragmented the police force is?
I think there's a general theme that relative to Europeans, Americans are more concerned with impositions by the state but much less concerned with impositions by non-state actors, even though from the perspective of an average citizen the two might not be readily distinguishable as lofty authorities. As a caricature, we figure that an American would get very upset by the government banning him from soapboxing for some political position, but would see nothing wrong with it if a corporation bought up all roads and public squares in his city and instituted a ban against voicing the same position on company property (along with a host of other house rules). Moreover, if someone then proposed to force the company to surrender roads or parks to the public hand, or circumscribed its right to enforce rules of its choosing on it, the American might be up in arms about that being an intrusion upon the company's free speech.
Right, and putting people in jail for 25 years to life for all sorts of one-off transgressions comes off as nuts and authoritarian to us, as to million-dollar fines and jail terms for software piracy (...).
I'm unsure where Radley Balko got his data and I'm not sure where my copy is, but my memory of his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, claims the figure in 2013 to be around 50,000 annually, although whether or not each of these raids where SWAT teams are used can be correctly characterized as "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building" is another question.
it turns out this has happened, or something akin to it, and the public was broadly against it and resulted in multiple SCOTUS decisions prohibiting that activity; the first examples were "company towns" (Marsh v. Alabama) and another more recent example was malls (Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robinson)
the state didn't propose to force the companies to surrender property to the public hand, they forced the companies to be restricted in similar ways to the state when it comes to first amendment protections; I am unsure about the public's response to the SCOTUS decisions
unless you're talking about "one-off transgressions" like premeditated or felony murder, this doesn't really happen
million dollar fines and jail terms for piracy, like when the Pirate Bay founders were imprisoned for a year and had to pay $1m fines? or the kino.to guy who got like a 4 year sentence? I agree the US gives stiffer prison terms and fines for piracy, but let's not go overboard here.
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Please don't attribute your views to all / most Europeans. There's nothing wrong with their prison system, and the last time I interacted with them, their police force was way friendlier and more professional than any I saw in Europe.
Huh, where are you from? My very first impressions of US police (when I came for the first time as a tourist) consisted of a border guard interrogating me for half an hour because he wasn't convinced I would not illegally enroll to study without authorisation on my one-week trip to visit a friend at MIT, and two NYC cops getting into a fighting posture when I asked them for directions before settling down and merely staring at me like I am insane, and finally barking a useless answer. I have never been to a place in Europe where you couldn't ask police for directions and get a helpful and detailed answer.
I'm sure there are exceptions to the view I described, but I stand by most. It also is to be expected that exceptions would be highly overrepresented on a right-leaning American politics forum.
I won't get specific, but I'm from Eastern Europe, and currently living in the west.
Ok, I didn't like the border guys either, but it's easy to not have a bad impression of their European counterparts when you're essentially out of their jurisdiction in the overwhelming majority of the continent.
New Jersey cops would make small talk, and I'd shoot the shit with them every once in a while. Once I wanted to go for a walk on the beach and it looked like they were blocking the entrance, it turned out they weren't it's just a spot they picked to stand around on patrol, and when I asked if I can cross they were almost apologetic. I was in NYC too, and might have interacted with cops there too, but I don't really remember.
Police in Europe tends to be cold and distant, and gives off a strong "don't question my authoritah" vibe. If you argue with them they'll fuck with you just to prove who's boss, though that may be a universal thing in any country. One time when I had a minor car accident and the other guy decided to call the cops, I was put through some bizarre shakedown at the hands of a sargent trying to impress 2 new trainees for absolutely no reason, since I freely admitted my culpability. Another time my car had an oil leak that I dutifully reported the moment it happened, and the cops decided to pay me a visit at 6AM on a weekend morning to interrogate me, trying to pin on me a completely different leak that happened a few streets away.
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So, you’ve had a grand total of two interactions with American police - at least one of which seems like you just getting unlucky with two local beat cops whom you may have caught off-guard or who may have been occupied by something else when you approached them - and you’ve used these two interactions to form, and double down on, a perception of American policing which even you seem to acknowledge diverges wildly from the available statistical data?
No, I never said those were the only two...? Those were just on my first visit to the US. I later came back to spend several years there, which involved a few more interactions of my own that were mostly not any better, and many stories from people I knew personally that were significantly worse.
Huh? Germany continues having <20 people killed annually by police. That's <1/30 the killings, at ~1/4 the population. I'm not going to try to dig up statistics to compare every single detailed scenario, because where comparable statistics are easy to find it clearly backs up my narrative - for just about any possible hostile/violent action by police, US police do it at a higher rate than European police. I'm completely sympathetic to explanations along the lines of this being inevitable/justified because the population being policed is much more dangerous and unruly, but this does not mean you have to deny the basic discrepancy of symptoms
This was your original narrative. Now you have retreated to a much more defensible and empirically-supported “American police use deadly force more often than European police” narrative, which no serious person denies, but which bears almost no resemblance to your cartoonish original statement.
Are you? That wasn’t the thrust of your initial post, in which you implied that American police use deadly force just because they feel like it, and that their application of deadly force is arbitrary and capricious. If, for example, the high rates of deadly force in federal searches are due to the fact that the feds generally only get involved when an individual is suspected of being involved in particularly serious crime, and therefore is almost by definition a particularly dangerous (and desperate) individual, that reality looks nothing like the narrative that the feds are shooting people because they’re having a bad day.
No serious observer of American policing denies that American police use violence more often than Euro police do. It’s just that every honest analysis must inevitably conclude that this is due at least in large part to the very different populations, and very different levels of access to firearms, that American police are forced to contend with.
You assert that every comparison makes American police “look worse”, but why should I think it makes police look bad when they kill people who deserve it? Why should that be considered a worse outcome than not using deadly force? Why should I wish for dangerous criminals to be suffered to live, when the opportunity arises to eliminate them from the population? You seem to want American police to put the cart before the horse; you want them to act as though the populace they’re policing is already at a level of human capital comparable to the populations of Europe, when that is obviously not the current reality they’re facing.
I'm getting the sense that you switch between taking my words overly literally in some cases and loosely reinterpreting it in a way that is convenient for your argument in others. To rehash:
I think that searches, SWAT calls and other similar "they come to your house because they think there is a threat in it to neutralise" situations in particular are a scenario in which I would feel much less safe around US police than around European police.
Data supports that US police in general are much more likely to injure and kill those they interact with than European police
Personal experiences support that US police are more hostile and less helpful than their European counterparts. This is in their interactions with me as a Caucasian academic with naive good-kid vibes; who knows what they would do if they were responding to a SWAT call or following a lead from someone in the computer security "industry" I know.
I grant that there are reasons they turned out like that, but I see no evidence that they are not like that to everyone, i.e. that the hostility is precisely targeted at the uniquely American problem elements. There are more YouTube bodycam videos of American police roughing up harmless-looking white kids than total incidents of German police doing that.
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Do you genuinely believe this is an accurate description of reality? What percentage of interactions between police and the public in the United States do you believe result in the use of deadly force?
Others have compiled stats on the number of injuries and deadly shootings, but note that I was talking about searches, not all interactions. It seems that there are on the order of 2000 federal searches a year, but I can't find either data on how many of those resulted in discharge of a firearm or how many search warrants were issued to non-federal police, so I guess the only thing I can say is "up to 25% deadly and 100% attempted" for searches. My somewhat arbitrary guess would be that it's about 2% in reality for searches where the target individual is present.
Im having trouble deciphering what your claim is. Are you saying that 2% of federal searches result in a deadly shooting? Or are you saying that 25% of them do?
Also, why are “federal searches” - a vanishingly small percentage of the total interactions between law enforcement and the public - an issue that weighs seriously on your perception of law enforcement practices in the United States? The vast majority of policing in this country is done at the local level, and to a lesser extent at the state level. Federal law enforcement is a tiny segment of American policing.
It was an example. As I said in response to your other post, in every easily-delineated scenario where there is evidence that can be compared, US police look worse. To try to rebut this by dismissing each easily-delineated scenario as an irrelevant small sample seems like a god-of-the-gaps argument to me - "surely in some other domain that we just so don't happen to have good data on, US police are actually nicer and more professional than European police! What, they're also hostile and violent in this one? Guess they must be nicer and more professional in one of the many others!"
I said that I think that 2% do, but based on the data I could find the only thing that can be proved is that there is an upper bound of about 25% (about 600 total killings, of which an unknown percentage happened during federal searches, vs. ~2000 federal searches).
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I see this talking point a lot and it always irritates me. Britain has 200 H-bombs. France has about 200 H-bombs. The European half of NATO has about 1.5 million professional soldiers, several carrier squadrons, huge numbers of tanks, aircraft and submarines... They have BAE, Rheinmetall, Eurofighters. They have 450 million people! It does not matter whether they spend 2% of GDP or 3% or 1%, what matters is the actual balance of capabilities.
How does Russia threaten Europe? This isn't 1978. Russian conventional forces are outmatched and pure demography is massively against them. There's no way 140 million people conquer 450 million when tech and wealth leans vaguely towards the latter.
The only thing the Russians have that Europe does not is a much larger nuclear arsenal and large-scale munitions production. The notion that Europe is somehow leeching off the US makes zero sense. They already have broad conventional superiority. Even with higher munitions output Russia is not capable of rushing through to Warsaw, let alone Berlin and wouldn't take such risks anyway. Why would they get into a war with several nuclear powers?
The US is actually a major threat to Europe, causing retarded wars in the Middle East with damaging flow-on effects into Europe. Or their rather successful gambit to split Russia from Europe. No more cheap energy from Russia, get excited about expensive energy from America! Of course the Europeans bear much of the blame for passively sitting back and letting the US protect them from competitive energy prices and homogenous, high-trust society. Nevertheless, the US is ultimately at fault.
The US's real dependants are in the Pacific - Australia, Japan, South Korea. They actually face an industrially, demographically, militarily potent foe in China.
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On economics, I buy it. But authoritarianism is slipperier. On issues of speech, religious freedom, gun rights, or search and seizure, the U.S. is far from perfect but far better than most of Europe – certainly than the European countries most visible from this side of the pond: the U.K., France, and Germany.
'Authoritarianism' is equivocal. Sometimes it means a strong executive leader overruling the bureaucracy and consensus-making institutions to implement policy. (This sense usually comes from the blue tribe.) Other times it refers to a reduction in civil rights for private citizens. (This sense is used by everyone, but different sides disagree about which rights to complain about.)
A good example: 2020 Republicans decrying the 'authoritarianism' of government Covid policy, while 2020 Democrats were decrying the 'authoritarianism' of Trump trying to interfere with government agencies implementing Covid policy.
"Authoritarianism" isn't equivocal; the Democrats were just wrong.
Perhaps StoneToss demonstrates the difference a bit clearer.
A common meme in the western world is that a strong leader not bound by constitutional/bureaucratic restraints and low personal freedom go together. They share the same word: it is all 'authoritarianism'. Whereas it is clear to me that oppression of personal freedoms is a possible for every node within the Polybius cycle, and if anything democracy tends to more restrictions and a more ant-farm-like society.
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