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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).
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.
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.
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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