> The degrees to which peoples actually criticize their governments in
> public, demonstrate against them, and so forth and governments
> tolerate or repress criticisms and demonstrations can't be evaluated
> by looking at laws, however. For that, we have to examine what people
> actually do. The Bill of Rights of the United States theoretically
> guarantees the freedoms of press, assembly, association, and so forth,
> and arguably it's better than European laws concerning the same, but
> Americans criticize and protest against their government less
> frequently and vigorously than peoples of many other countries, and
> America also has the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher
> than Iran and Venezuela.
>
> The mass media here, mainly voluntarily, promote the USG's agenda when
> it really matters, so skillfully that Americans have far more
> illusions about their government than almost any other people have
> about their government in the world.
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This is indisputable: "The degrees to which peoples actually criticize their
governments...can't be evaluated by looking at laws".
Laws can be repealed or turned into a dead letter, when conditions warrant. The Bill of Rights and similar constitutional protections in other countries are relevant only up to a point - that being when political unrest threatens the social order. In the US, freedom of expression was sharply curtailed during the Palmer Raids, the depression, and McCarthyism, and is now again being circumscribed because of the renewed threat to stability posed by radical Islamists at home and abroad.
As these earlier periods showed, the indoctrination of the population by the media and other means of socialization is also primarily rooted in social conditions rather than any particular "skills" of the latter. Whenever there has been widespread distress and dislocation, Americans have shown the capacity to shed their illusions and to turn their backs on the traditional opinion- and decision-makers as quickly as any other people on the planet. The US bourgeosie, however, has been historically favoured till now with abundant resources and wide ocean barriers which has allowed it, together with the selective and limited application of force, to more easily overcome its problems and regain social legitimacy with the broad mass of the population.