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There are several reasons. 1. Many parts of Europe still have a strong labor movement. This is the only effective counterbalance to corporate power in politics

by jmyeet 4y ago

There are several reasons. 1. Many parts of Europe still have a strong labor movement. This is the only effective counterbalance to corporate power in politics. The US has what may be the lowest rate of union coverage in the OECD (~10%) and most of that is police and teacher unions; 2. Europe by and large is not hypercapitalist like the US is. The normal is social democracy, which is still fundamentally capitalist but way less extreme; 3. Religion. Different European countries have more or less mostly Christian influence but that influence is way less militant. White evangelicalism and its effect ofn politics is more akin to wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. It's also hyper-capitalist; 4. The election process itself in European countries isn't generally political. US states often have the Secretary of State in charge of elections and that's a political office. Redistricting is inherently political. Other countries don't do this. Electoral boundaries are more often drawn by an independent organization; 5. Europe doesn't suffer from the "money = speech" falsehood; and 6. Europe still has the recent memory of two World Wars and the HOlocaust that favors cooperation over division.

vannevar 4y ago
#5 here should be #1, by a mile. Here in Texas, Google is carpet-bombing local TV with ads blasting the bipartisan AIAOC as an attack on American technology by "tha lib'rals," cynically exploiting the political division to scare off Republican votes. They're laundering their money through the Koch brothers' Taxpayer's Protection Alliance. The ads might be a little less effective if they ended with a big "paid for by Google" banner and voice-over.
kmeisthax 4y ago
For #1 an additional stumbling block for the labor movement is that it's rather difficult to create a limited-liability labor cooperative in the US. For-profit LLCs have legal advantages over other non-profit corporate forms. I suspect if someone tried to make something equivalent to Mondragon in the US, they'd have problems just maintaining the corporate veil and their workers would get crushed under the maddening hellscape that is consumer product liability. #3 doesn't pass the sniff test to me: Europe has it's Christian Wahhabists, too. Hungary and Poland broke the backs of their democracies even faster than the US is, in the name of banning gay people, and they've cooperated to break the EU sanctions mechanism that was supposed to keep them from doing this. Also #5 is wrong - or, at least, not properly root-caused. "Money-equals-speech" is itself a result of free-speech extremism. If we say the government can't regulate speech, then a way around that is to regulate money spent to speak. Let's say Ron DeSantis wants to ban gay advocacy - but the 1st Amendment says "hell no". Instead he gets a bill passed that bans spending money to purchase pride flags, buying paper to print books with gay characters in them, buying billboards with pro-LGBT messaging, or TV ad spots with the same. It's very difficult to not read this as a speech-restricting bill. The argument in Citizens' United - the money-equals-speech case - was that even a content-neutral funding cap was an infringement of free speech. The government can't mandate that all politicians whisper, after all. Except now we have a fundraising war because every politician needs to shout as loudly as possible. And to do that you need lots of money. The US Supreme Court didn't invent "money-equals-speech", it's just a fact of how political speech works. Europe does not have this problem because Europe is willing to entertain restrictions on political speech that the US considers unconscionable. Several EU member states have constitutional bans on fascism and hate speech[0], for example. You could never get away with that in the US for any reason. Freedom of speech is not entirely unprotected in the EU, of course - the protections are just more reasoned and considered than the blunt instrument of "Congress shall make no law". I'm not sure about #6 either. Did America not get involved in WWII? I mean, we did try to cover up the Holocaust[1] early on and we got involved later than Europe, but it's just as culturally engrained here as it presumably is over there. [0] Which, BTW, should be considered as censorious in and of themselves. Any political ideology which calls for the killing of specific groups of people is engaging in censorship. [1] Specifically: FDR knew about it early on; and the New York Times buried it many pages deep because they were shy about being a "Jewish newspaper".

by jmyeet 4y ago

vannevar 4y ago

#5 here should be #1, by a mile. Here in Texas, Google is carpet-bombing local TV with ads blasting the bipartisan AIAOC as an attack on American technology by "tha lib'rals," cynically exploiting the political division to scare off Republican votes. They're laundering their money through the Koch brothers' Taxpayer's Protection Alliance. The ads might be a little less effective if they ended with a big "paid for by Google" banner and voice-over.

kmeisthax 4y ago

For #1 an additional stumbling block for the labor movement is that it's rather difficult to create a limited-liability labor cooperative in the US. For-profit LLCs have legal advantages over other non-profit corporate forms. I suspect if someone tried to make something equivalent to Mondragon in the US, they'd have problems just maintaining the corporate veil and their workers would get crushed under the maddening hellscape that is consumer product liability. #3 doesn't pass the sniff test to me: Europe has it's Christian Wahhabists, too. Hungary and Poland broke the backs of their democracies even faster than the US is, in the name of banning gay people, and they've cooperated to break the EU sanctions mechanism that was supposed to keep them from doing this. Also #5 is wrong - or, at least, not properly root-caused. "Money-equals-speech" is itself a result of free-speech extremism. If we say the government can't regulate speech, then a way around that is to regulate money spent to speak. Let's say Ron DeSantis wants to ban gay advocacy - but the 1st Amendment says "hell no". Instead he gets a bill passed that bans spending money to purchase pride flags, buying paper to print books with gay characters in them, buying billboards with pro-LGBT messaging, or TV ad spots with the same. It's very difficult to not read this as a speech-restricting bill. The argument in Citizens' United - the money-equals-speech case - was that even a content-neutral funding cap was an infringement of free speech. The government can't mandate that all politicians whisper, after all. Except now we have a fundraising war because every politician needs to shout as loudly as possible. And to do that you need lots of money. The US Supreme Court didn't invent "money-equals-speech", it's just a fact of how political speech works. Europe does not have this problem because Europe is willing to entertain restrictions on political speech that the US considers unconscionable. Several EU member states have constitutional bans on fascism and hate speech[0], for example. You could never get away with that in the US for any reason. Freedom of speech is not entirely unprotected in the EU, of course - the protections are just more reasoned and considered than the blunt instrument of "Congress shall make no law". I'm not sure about #6 either. Did America not get involved in WWII? I mean, we did try to cover up the Holocaust[1] early on and we got involved later than Europe, but it's just as culturally engrained here as it presumably is over there. [0] Which, BTW, should be considered as censorious in and of themselves. Any political ideology which calls for the killing of specific groups of people is engaging in censorship. [1] Specifically: FDR knew about it early on; and the New York Times buried it many pages deep because they were shy about being a "Jewish newspaper".