From a comment thread of a post that compared conservatives to the Taliban:

This I think really sums it up, they want us to be more like France, more godless.

Gods, Gays and Guns (none / 0)

I think it’s more complicated than “their far right is like our far right”. Compared to the other democracies, even mainstream political discourse in the U.S. really demonizes and vilifies progressive and liberal ideas. And I think that agressive hostility to all things “liberal” points to a tendency within our mainstream, not just at our margins, to resemble the “other” more than we would like to admit.

Fareed Zakaria hints at it here:

This is what really divides the U.S. from the other industrial democracies: Gods, Gays and Guns, if you will. If you were to take a sampling of public opinion in countries all [over] the world–and this has been done by the Pew foundation–you would find that the United States on most of these core cultural issues is much closer [to] Nigeria and Saudi Arabia than it is to Europe to Japan. Source

Mix together some of our national characteristics like belief in American exceptionalism, the prominence of religious belief in our lives (compared to the other democracies), isolationism/insularity, an abysmal mind-numbing mass media, the weakness of non-governmental centers of power like organized labor, the arrogance of overwhelming military power, etc., add to that the wounded nationalism of 9/11, and I think we are developing into a society where all kinds of intolerance and extremism are able to take root, so long as we wrap them in the flag.

Maybe I just feel vulnerable and pessimistic because I’m a liberal in a very red county, but I see a propensity to intolerance, militarism and fundamentalist thought as a characteristic of mainstream America right now, not just a feature of the far right that we can use to batter the talibaptists with.

by Diane on Tue Jul 5th, 2005 at 15:44:18 PDT