What really befuddles me isn't so much the fiscal conservatism of the US, it's the saliency of social/cultural matters and the continuous struggle over them.
Here in Greece, arguably the most socially conservative of European western democracies, abortion was legalized thirty years ago with little fuss, after being accepted practice for much longer, and nobody has ever talked about it again.
Gay people were never targeted for ridicule and condemnation by our (powerful) Orthodox church and its conservative political allies.
And while anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise due to our economic hardships, there is nowhere near the venom and hate of people like Tom Tancredo and Steve King.
Ever heard of Le Pen, Bossi, Haider, Kjaersgaard, etc, etc?
Immigration and racism is one subject where Europe can't really claim to be much better than the US. If we had anything like the US-Mexican border I think racism would be a lot worse than it already is...
If one were to over-generalize in a ridiculous fashion one could say that anyone in Europe who cared about religio nwas born again in the nineteenth century and had to flee to the US. Ergo...
Yeah, thanks about the condescension.
We have the equivalent of the Mexican-American border: it's called the Aegean. And yet until the last couple of years, incidents of xenophobia were very few and far between here. So perhaps it's time for you to stop the overgeneralizations.
