Germany has barely made it to the 30 year mark of “not being a dictatorship” if you count the East. America has been one of the freest countries in the world for at least 150-some years.

Correct. So free that women got the right to vote in 1920s. African Americans in the 1960s.

East Germans got the right to vote in the 1990's. Largely as a consequence of American diplomatic pressure on the Soviet Union, I might add.

Which other countries were much better? Obviously the fact that women and African Americans got the vote so late is not good, but America could still be one of the freest countries in the last 150 years if most everyone else was even worse.

I think there are lots of Western countries that have never had laws barring people from voting due to their race. E.g., there has never been any such law in the UK. Women in the UK also got the vote slightly earlier.

The UK is an abnormally successful democracy by world standards. I suppose you could quibble about the British Empire, but the main difference there is that Britain colonized much more of the world than America did.

The main question I have concerns Britain’s history of anti-Catholic discrimination. It’s all well and good to point out that Britain never disenfranchised black people during a time when approximately zero black people lived there. Although I suppose Britain is responsible for colonizing South Africa and Rhodesia....

But sure, let’s concede Britain for the moment. France, West Germany, and Italy were effectively fascist dictatorships until the mid-1940’s. (Vichy being a “puppet government” is a lie concocted to spare French pride—Petain was a fascist sympathizer since before the war and he took power within the French political system at the time—its not like the Germans overran the government and installed him like they did in other occupied countries.) Spain and Portugal until the 1970’s. Yugoslavia had a communist dictatorship until the 1990’s. Which is incidentally the same decade that Switzerland achieved universal women’s suffrage.

>But sure, let’s concede Britain for the moment.

Great - that was the point of my post. Not sure why you are going off on a bunch of other tangents. You haven't mentioned any other country which banned people from voting on racial criteria.

>It’s all well and good to point out that Britain never disenfranchised black people during a time when approximately zero black people lived there.

You say this as if Britain started disenfranchising black people once they were present in significant numbers, but this is not the case. (This is not to deny, of course, that there is a long history of racism in the UK. I'm merely pointing out that the US is relatively exceptional in passing actual laws banning black people from voting.)

Because you’re comparing a continent-wide federation to a tiny island-sized country.

> You say this as if Britain started disenfranchising black people once they were present in significant numbers, but this is not the case.

No, they just colonized Africa and disenfranchised them there. Totally different.

>Because you’re comparing a continent-wide federation to a tiny island-sized country.

I really don't see what you're getting at here. You yourself have been making (irrelevant) comparisons to France, which has about the same population as the UK.

There is no such size as "island-sized". Islands can be big or small.

>No, they just colonized Africa and disenfranchised them there. Totally different.

Indeed, this is completely different.

> I really don't see what you're getting at here. You yourself have been making (irrelevant) comparisons to France, which has about the same population as the UK.

I’m comparing the US as a whole to Europe as a whole. If you want to cherry-pick the best example of Europe, maybe I should cherry-pick one of the northern states that abolished slavery and enfranchised black people in the early 19th century. If you get to claim that France, Spain, Portugal, etc. don’t count, I should be able to claim Mississippi doesn’t count.

Conversely, maybe we can compare the US to the entire British Empire. How many imperial subjects were truly enfranchised? Not the Indians, not the black Africans. Hell, even within the UK itself there was the entire Irish issue. But I guess Irish and Catholic aren’t technically races.

You were not comparing the US as a whole to Europe as a whole.

It is not clear to me what point your are intending to make with this array of different comparisons.

My overall point, I think, was adequately well-stated with my first comment in this thread: America has been one of the freest countries in the world for 150 years.

Your counterarguments seem to consist of, “so was Britain” (which is insufficient to refute my point) and “Britain didn’t disenfranchise based on race” (which is factually dubious when you consider colonization as well as insufficient in terms of proving that Britain was substantially freer than America as a whole).

You also alluded to “lots of Western countries”, which is why I specifically broke down specific periods where many (most?) Western countries were not free within the past century. This is when you doubled down on the UK angle, which is a fair point but proves very little.

You also claimed the UK enacted women’s suffrage before the US. I didn’t bother fact checking this at the time, but the US enacted full women’s suffrage eight years before the UK.

> In 1928 the Conservative government passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act equalizing the franchise to all persons over the age of 21 on equal terms.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage_in_the_Unit...)

The US:

> After a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920.[4] It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage_in_the_Unit...

You're reading a lot of things into my original reply that just aren't there.

If so, it’s only because I was making the IMO generous assumption that your original reply was meant to actually refute my thesis that “ America has been one of the freest countries in the world for at least 150-some years.”, and CDSlice’s argument that “America could still be one of the freest countries in the last 150 years if most everyone else was even worse.”

If you were intentionally making insufficient and hence irrelevant points, why wade into the thread in the first place?

> I think there are lots of Western countries that have never had laws barring people from voting due to their race.

This might technically be true, because many of those Western countries have taken the further step of abolishing democracy altogether. I hope you would agree that the various fascist and fascist-adjacent dictatorships of 20th century Europe were “even worse” than racial disenfranchisement.

> E.g., there has never been any such law in the UK.

The use of “e.g.” here implies that you’re discussing Western countries in general and not just the UK. Also, this point is rather fatuous for reasons I’ve already discussed.

> Women in the UK also got the vote slightly earlier.

This is false, as I’ve already discussed.

>If so, it’s only because I was making the IMO generous assumption that your original reply was meant to actually refute my thesis

It wasn't. Note that I was not replying to your comment.

You were responding—fatuously—to CDSlice’s comment that “America could still be one of the freest countries in the last 150 years if most everyone else was even worse.” Which is a restatement of my thesis.

And right to gay marriage in 2015.