A more politically liberal state can very well have a higher incarceration rate and a less vigorous press than a less liberal state. The kind of limits placed on free press and speech by European states -- through libel laws, content-based censorship, regulations of political campaigns and commercial advertisements, and so on -- is not allowed in the USA. Americans do not think of inmates in jails and prisons of the USA as political prisoners (whose presence would challenge the tenets of political liberalism) -- most of the inmates are indeed legally common criminals and are moreover morally regarded as such by most of their fellow citizens. Hence, political liberalism is not only compatible with a less politically diverse and vigorous press and a higher rate of incarceration than elsewhere -- political liberalism has helped create and maintain them, for it leads Americans to think they are freer than all others despite them.
> > It's the same strong adherence to the principles of political
> > liberalism that has created a polity in the USA that lets you freely
> > open BDSM clubs or KKK chapters or sex toy stores or other businesses
> > and associations in the private sector;
>
> Ever been to Amsterdam? Rudy closed down a lot of our sex shops in
> NYC, which used to be the embodiment of American liberalism.
How did Giuliani get to close sex shops? Through theocratic means? No. He did so through zoning laws to enhance property values -- perfectly compatible with the tenets of American political liberalism.
More to the point, just the fact that American leftists reply, "But we have BDSM clubs, sex toy shops, free condoms in New York City" to a statement that the US government does not provide its citizens with free contraceptives and many other benefits and services that even some Third-World governments provide as a matter of rights of citiznes, substituting market, civil society, or at best municipal solutions for national government solutions, demonstrates the strength of liberalism in the USA.
On 9/19/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 19, 2007, at 9:25 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > In short, political liberalism tends to privatize, expanding the space
> > for freedom (of the negative sort, freedom from government regulation,
> > the only kind of freedom that Americans recognize as freedom) --
> > sexual and religious, as well as political and economic, freedoms --
> > in the private sector and contracting the scope of the public sector
> > that provides citizens with goods and services as a matter of their
> > rights. The American citizen has few social duties but also few
> > social rights, the opposite of the Cuban or Iranian citizen who has
> > many social duties but also many social rights.
>
> This model does not have room for Scandinavian social democracy,
> which allows a lot of scope for private freedoms and civil liberties.
> It's like you've taken Esping-Andersen's famous three-part model -
> liberal, corporatist, and social democratic - and lopped off the
> social democratic taxon.
Scandinavian states, most political scientists recognize, adhere less to the principles of political liberalism than Anglo-American liberal states. I bundled European corporatist and social democratic states into one category for the purpose of this discussion, for they both stand in the middle -- between the liberal states in the North on one hand and the populist and socialist states in the Third World -- in terms of degrees of adherence to the principles of liberalism.
> And "secular"? The U.S.? Is there any country in the Northern
> hemisphere where religion is such a part of public life? We have a
> president who takes direction from God, a porn strike force in the
> Justice Department, and a populace that claims it's more likely to
> vote for a queer than an atheist. Look at the current absurd
> controversy over John McCain's religion. Where else could that happen?
The US government itself, which is liberal and secular, does not disqualify atheists from political office nor does it make a controversy out of John McCain's religion -- it is individuals and institutions of civil society, many of them religious, here that do so freely. That distinction is a fundamental one to political liberalism. -- Yoshie