This is old news from an even older thread and for the most part not subject to much disagreement on a list such as this.
Since you insist on a pursuing a comparative argument, how much less? How many fewer safeguards and how less effective are those in place? You might round up all the usual suspects, incarceration rates, corporate media control, prosecutorial misconduct, police brutality and abuse, gov't intrusion into privacy and gov't control over information, but in doing a comparison, don't we need some comparative data? I don't know how the U.S. comes out compared to other rich (or poor) nations. Do Americans enjoy fewer procedural safeguards _from_ gov't than, say, France, England, Spain, Japan? And how is it that these nations who have a longer tradition of centralized states have managed to construct civil liberties safeguards when their welfare states were developed in part to advance state control over dissent and disruption?
I think the issue is far more complicated than a simple indictment of bourgeois democracy, though the history of first amendment protections paints a judiciary, a state, and a people who seem to hold dearly their right to infringe, restrict, and deny some very basic freedoms. Incarceration rates perhaps touch on something other than simple civil liberties protection and represent a longer tradition of criminalizing poverty and race. Clearly the US has to negotiate some potent contradictions, not the least of which is the formal expression of legal freedom and the past and present reality of social inequality and criminalization may in part be explained by that. Yet, how do other nations fare regarding such a contradiction?
Dennis