Unexceptional America

Debunking Tyrannophobic Fan Fiction Through the Practice of Comparative Politics

Ross Barkan @RossBarkan

Always enjoy reading portentous articles in national liberal publications about the destruction of voter rights in America and seeing that all the restrictions they decry existed in New York until 2020 or still very much exist

By Tim Shampling

Tim Shampling is the pseudonym of a professor teaching somewhere in America.

In America, we are accustomed to a steady drumbeat of alarm regarding the health of our Republic. Every Presidential election I have voted in has been presented as “the most important of our lifetime.” But since the shock of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, there has been a shift in both the frequency and specificity of these warnings. We are regularly subjected to arguments, pursued at great length in both bestselling books and in the pages of our most respected media properties, that America is on the verge of a descent into fascism, or at least some more generic kind of tyrannical rule. “Today,” Timothy Snyder muses, “our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century.” While they gain a certain superficial legitimacy from Trump’s alarming personal behavior, often these arguments are actually constructed around objections to Republican policies that are not at all outside the international norms from which America is claimed to have diverged. Indeed, there is something perverse about the issues such writers select as the bases for their dire warnings. While there are issues on which the American right is a global outlier–on gun control, climate change, and government-sponsored health care, for example–a remarkable share of tyrannophobic discourse centers precisely those issues on which the Republican party is not out of step with established democratic norms. My own view is that this demonstrates a more general shift: as the years go by, America is becoming less “exceptional,” for good and ill. We remain a distinct species, to be sure, but in almost all those areas which provoke the most plangent–frankly, at times, unhinged–rhetoric, both current American practice and, more notably, the reforms championed by our supposedly-aberrant conservatives, sit comfortably within the genus of 21st-century Western democracies. 

There is a deeper irony to this misleading, negative exceptionalism. Not only does it place its proponents in an analogous–and more civically corrosive–position to the purveyors of the childish, jingoistic American exceptionalism with which I grew up in the ’90s and early ’00s, against whom they more or less define themselves, but it serves to obscure the degree to which it is in fact their “side” that is quite often the one pursuing the maintenance or expansion of practices outside of global norms. It is frustrating (and amusingly consonant with the stereotypical image of the insular, ignorant American) the extent to which they and their audience of the Great and Good seem genuinely unaware of this, and for that reason it is perhaps worth a short survey of the actual state of European (we will largely limit ourselves to European) policy and practice regarding several of the more prominent hot-button issues often raised in this context.

To start with abortion.

Before the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade earlier this summer, the U.S. was genuinely an outlier. While our rapidly shifting new reality has seen many red states enact much more restrictive laws than most of our peer nations, we also still have blue states whose laws are analogously much more permissive. Elective abortion is available most in European countries only up to certain gestational limits, often the first trimester, whereas in the U.S. (after Roe), nearly half of the states have enshrined the right to abortion in state law either up to an ambiguous benchmark of “fetal viability” (often understood to be around 23-24 weeks), or, in the case of six states, with no limit. Over time, given that American attitudes about abortion are quite in line with European norms–65% responding in a 2021 polling that it should “usually” be illegal beyond the first trimester–it seems probable that a range of purple states will settle on something that actually does approximate standard European practice, with few restrictions during the early stages of fetal development and heavy restrictions thereafter. To be sure, this will leave a strange pattern of legal variation between states, at least for a while–the recent results of a Kansas referendum throw into question how far even many red states will go in restricting abortion rights before fifteen weeks–but post-Roe we will on average be closer to the European standard than we were before. Don’t let French President Emmanuel Macron’s hyperventilation fool you: France has a substantially more restrictive abortion regime than blue-state America, limiting the availability of voluntary abortion at just fourteen weeks. Even taking into account the degree to which France allows for broad doctor discretion in cases where a mother’s health is judged to be at risk, the American state whose laws most closely approximate France’s is none other than Florida–a state we are consistently told is led by an authoritarian. Florida’s new law, which includes the same customary exception for circumstances wherein doctors judge a mother’s health to be in danger, limits abortion after fifteen weeks.

More astonishingly, the Supreme Court of Germany–the new leader of the free world!–considers abortion to be in violation of the Constitution’s commitment to human dignity! What tyranny! What anti-democracy! Legal restrictions on abortion that the U.S. media and Democratic Party memeplex would surely consider unvarnished hateful patriarchy (the procedure is declared illegal, but criminal punishment is suspended if it is performed twelve weeks or fewer into the pregnancy) continue in Germany to this very day.

Actually, on this front both today’s Germany and the U.S. between Roe and Dobbs were exceptions in treating abortion as a constitutional issue at all. Thus in taking the issue out of the constitutional domain, Dobbs made the U.S. procedurally and institutionally more like most other democracies. In fact, if we regard the European Union as devoted Europeanists consider it–a budding federation– even the patchwork variation between states begins to look something like the variation between the more permissive western and some of the more restrictive eastern E.U. countries. If this is the road to fascism, the E.U. itself is well along it.

Another alleged road to fascism: recent voting reforms, such as those in Georgia. These arguments of course were particularly absurd: not only were these laws far less demanding than the voter ID laws that prevail throughout Europe, they were not even more “restrictive” than the current legislation in several blue states! It is worth reviewing the European laws, though, to demonstrate the full abnormality of the “pro-democracy” position. Although one almost never hears it mentioned, European democracies are so worried about electoral fraud that, of 47 surveyed states, only the United Kingdom did not require a government-issued photo ID to vote. Although the inconvenient fact was neglected amidst the heated debates on electoral reform here, postal voting is highly curtailed or totally banned: among the latter cluster of countries in which no in-country absentee balloting is permitted at all are France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and all the Scandinavian nations, the latter usually being the idols of American social-democrats. And yet, even as Georgia lost the All-Star Game for an electoral reform that was perceived as racist and even though the requirements for voting it instantiated are far less demanding than these countries persist in calling themselves democracies, and the right-wing apologists at Freedom House have the gall to give them the highest marks for “political rights.” The American public seems to agree with Freedom House, though: opinion about electoral regulation in the U.S. tracks rather than departs from European notions. Even amidst the most insistent drumbeat of media hysteria on the issue in spring 2021, voter identification laws retained supermajority support across all demographic groups; a Rasmussen poll from March of last year that 69% of African-Americans and 84% of other minorities (compared with 77% of white respondents) support the demand for photo identification at the voting site.

Often, critiques of conservative attacks on “voting rights” are paired with a broader objection positing that, due to the existence of the Senate, Electoral College, and/or Supreme Court–and of course outrageous Republican gerrymandering–the U.S. is threatened by (or already suffers under) “minority rule.” Take, for example, Corey Robin. Democracy itself “is in trouble” according to his expert opinion: gerrymandering and voter ID laws “have made it easier for Republican officials to sabotage the administration and outcome of elections,” and it’s even at least partly the Constitution’s fault by allowing the existence of, say, a two-chamber legislature, or the Electoral College (representative of the founding document’s inherent “antipathy to equal representation and majority rule”). Let us set aside for now the (considerable) underlying conceptual problems with the oft-heard family of arguments that the Senate or Electoral College are “biased” against Democrats. What I want to argue instead is that the portrait of an American constitutional order uniquely frustrating to nationwide numerical electoral majorities is highly misleading.

Countermajoritarian institutions abound, for better or worse (mostly worse, in my opinion), in nearly every democracy in Europe. Center-left political scientists, in treating this situation, have been driven to coin terms like “constrained democratic administrative statehood” to describe a European reality they find unsatisfying. And it is not a trend that is reversing. For one thing, constitutional courts–the countermajoritarian institution par excellence–continue to gain power. (Of course, American liberals, while they have changed their tune somewhat recently, have not previously been inclined to view this particular countermajoritarian development as anything other than salutary.) In fact, given that this increasing judicialization is occurring at both the national and the E.U. level, creating increasingly byzantine interactions between the different unelected authorities, the progress of European judicialization is arguably more opaque and removed from citizen input than its American counterpart. As one scholar argues, courts in France, Italy, and Germany, in operating behind closed doors and issuing brief and often limited judgments, offer little space for public engagement on questions of constitutional significance. Because European courts thus occupy more opaquely the space between public opinion and elected officials, “there are frequently conflicts between the government and its majority and the organs in charge of the guardianship of its constitution”–the constitutional courts.

As far as the “malapportionment” of the American Senate goes, I challenge commentators to find democracies that have not featured non-majoritarian chambers, supermajority requirements for particular kinds of laws, or demographic quotas for legislatures or administrative bodies–all of which devices truncate the scope of majority decisionmaking for the sake of securing a more equitable regional or demographic representation. France still elects senators via grands électeurs, or departmental electoral colleges, while Germany foregoes elections entirely and instead relies on delegation-by-state-government to determine the members of its upper chamber (the Bundesrat).

The ultimate source of these “minority rule” complaints, of course, is the Electoral College, and particularly the strange results that it yielded in 2000 and (especially) 2016, seeing the candidate that won a plurality (though not a majority) at the polls lose out on the office to a rival who received fewer votes. Yet even here we are not entirely anomalous. Justin Trudeau remained in power in 2022 despite his Liberal party receiving a smaller percentage of the total vote than the Conservative party and garnering less than a third of the overall ballots tallied. Furthermore, if you can believe it, the U.K. Prime Minister hasn’t led a party that won 50% of the vote in a general election since the 1930s; only in the coalition government of 2010 could the executive credibly claim to have garnered a majority of the parliamentary vote. Shocking that they are allowed a place in the family of nations! (Then again, when a majority verdict was clearly given directly on an issue of national importance, that was also condemned as a near-fatal blow to democracy. Damned if you do…)

In general, multi-party proportional representation systems often yield heads of government whose majoritarian credentials for the office are questionable, as these systems remove the selection of the executive to back-room bargaining among party operatives themselves. Surprising, and far from obviously democratic, results are common: for instance, the party of the recently-resigned Israeli Prime Minister received five percent of the vote! While there are serious arguments in favor of such systems, there are equally serious arguments against them, including that they significantly undercut clear lines of accountability between the executive and the electorate. In any case, from the fact that every so often an American presidential election can be won by a second-place candidate who earned roughly 47% of the overall national vote, it is far from obvious that our constitutional system presents unparalleled obstacles to the implementation of the general will; that is certainly a strange and perhaps disquieting outcome, but other systems yield other outcomes that are strange and disquieting in different ways. Furthermore, in a parliamentary system, a minority executive, once in office, can wield a degree of unchecked power unattainable in our presidentialist, separation-of-powers system. So even when “minority” rule strikes us, it is a different and far more limited “rule” than that faced by parties that find themselves outside ruling coalitions in European-style parliamentary democracies.

This pattern repeats itself in the prestige media’s treatment of administrative issues as well. Take Covid: despite Europe’s heavy lockdowns, I would argue that on balance Florida–that national media bugbear–has been more in line with the norm across the Atlantic than have the supposedly cosmopolitan blue states.

While the official line of the CDC is that all individuals aged six months or more should be vaccinated, and all individuals aged five years or more should be boosted, the European CDC (ECDC) only explicitly recommends vaccination for individuals aged twelve years or older. Furthermore, the ECDC admits that “COVID-19 vaccine safety data in children aged 5-11 years are currently limited,” hence their unwillingness to explicitly endorse vaccination for individuals under twelve years of age. The CDC makes no such admission, and in fact definitively claims that “COVID-19 vaccination has been found to be safe for children and teens.” Compare, then, the ECDC’s guidelines with those of the Florida Health Department: “The Florida Department of Health (Department) does not recommend pediatric COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children. The currently available evidence on COVID-19 vaccines for children ages 6 months to 5 years is inadequate for assessing risks and benefits.” This Florida statement, despite rehashing the EU’s own admission on pediatric vaccination, provoked harsh reaction from American journalists eager to score points against DeSantis.

Regarding school reopenings, Florida again closely mirrored European policy. In June 2020, Governor DeSantis announced Florida’s strategies for re-opening schools, recommending that distancing and hygiene measures will help keep children safe during their return to in-person education. The ECDC declared similarly in August 2020 that “If appropriate physical distancing and hygiene measures are applied, schools are unlikely to be more effective propagating environments than other occupational or leisure settings with similar densities of people.” DeSantis’s reopening plans, despite offering a model for the European playbook, was nevertheless not popular with many American commentators because DeSantis bad. Luckily for such people, they can always send their kids (if they have any) to school in New York or Philadelphia.

Governor Ron DeSantis’s overall resistance to vaccinating children, determination to keep schools open, and clear move to a post-Covid era in 2022 more closely reflect European practice than the corresponding attitudes of the Biden administration and, especially, blue state and city governments. Perhaps more significantly, blue America’s strong and continuing emphasis on social sanctioning and decentralized shaming of those who don’t “take covid seriously,” is out of step with European norms

As those who have spent significant time in Western Europe in the Covid era will tell you, the maximalist attitude of American progressivism–which has often attributed contracting Covid to a failure of individual responsibility (an awkward register for a left otherwise allergic, sometimes to the point of absurdity, to such arguments), while simultaneously clinging to a public health approach aptly termed “communitarian hysteria”–is totally at odds with the prevailing social atmosphere there.

Or take the clamorous, highly moralistic immigration debate of the Trump era (mysteriously quieted since President Biden took office, though not without angst), with its ceaseless din of “no human is illegal” rhetoric and clear conceptual drift toward open borders. Even during the Trump era, the U.S. was distinct not in its hostility to illegal immigration but–the former President’s rhetoric and a certain drastic (and ultimately reversed) high-profile policy step notwithstanding–in its permissiveness toward it; in its acceptance of family-based, non-skilled migration it is more welcoming than most democracies. Most democracies make it hard to immigrate legally and deter illegal immigration with considerable prejudice. While there was an alarming and genuinely abnormal edge to the rhetoric with which it was presented, and a callous incompetence in the design and execution of many of its directives, the overall effect of the Trumpian immigration program was actually to make us more closely resemble Europe on this issue, where we find deportations occur at similar rates to the US, an increase of border guard staff, the use of walls along well-traveled frontiers. Indeed, since Merkel’s spectacular 2015 open door policy, the E.U. has battened down the hatches, and it even pays the autocratic Turkish regime to keep migrants from reaching its borders. Historically, there is just no denying that the most social-democratic nations in Europe have taken a dim view of immigration and appear to be returning to that stance, and overall European public opinion regarding immigration, reflecting the views of the entire political spectrum, matches or exceeds the American right in its hostility to new arrivals. As a study from earlier this year lays out, sizeable pluralities of citizens across a swathe of member states all: reject the migration targets established by the EU commission, wish for reductions of low-skilled immigration, and demand increases in border security. From a comparative perspective, what was especially notable about Biden immigration policy has not been the return to a more Trumpian-restrictionist approach including building the wall, but the more permissive attitude of the early months of his administration.

Finally, let’s examine the human rights crusade du jour of the American left: the “trans rights” question. This cluster of issues–and in particular wide access to “gender-affirming care” for “trans kids”–has been dubbed central to the legitimacy of democracy by influential portions of media and academe, with figures such as Judith Butler, Jason Stanley, and prominent NGOs asserting that skepticism of the movement has been called a gateway drug to a more all-encompassing “fascist” world view; as the journalist Kelly Hayes put it in a typical phrase in an interview with the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, “attacks on trans rights and lives become the moral battering ram of a new fascist era.” But, as has been superbly documented for Year Zero by Lisa Selin Davis, just as American progressives are rushing to extremes, (most recently California Democrats in a frightening new bill) European countries are tacking in the opposite direction, and tending toward a policy of caution in handling childhood transition and toward a reaffirmation of longstanding sex-based rights.

Of course, the mere fact that a policy or institutional structure is the European standard does not make it right, or right for America. (Indeed, red America has often maintained this against blue America’s traditional Europhilia.) But surely awareness of the degree to which American practice and the preferences of the American right are not atypical should slow down the intellectual-emotional progression, so common in certain quarters today, from opposition to a policy or criticism of a structure to the insistence that the enactment of the policy or persistence of the structure represents the destruction of an otherwise broadly-shared modern condition of “democracy.” As we’ve now seen, on many fronts, it is actually blue America’s idea of “democracy”–with unrestricted elective abortion, unrestricted mail-in voting with no voter identification requirements, strong hostility to any form of regional balancing or judicial countermajoritarian institutions, and an increasing inability to justify any immigration restriction at all–that sits outside currently-established global norms. The emerging 21st-century reality is that it is the prominence of these positions–in addition to and probably more importantly than the continuing right-wing outlier stances mentioned above–and the all-engulfing governmental and corporate “civil rights” machinery with which they are associated, that constitute our continuing claim, whatever we make of it, to be genuinely exceptional.