This Commonweal article is worth reading on why America is the least free democracy.
What we call “democratic socialism” in the United States is difficult to distinguish from the social-democratic traditions of post-war Western Europe, and there we find little evidence that a democracy becomes a dictatorship simply by providing such staples of basic social welfare as universal health care. At least, it is hard not to notice that the social-democratic governments of Europe have always gained power only by being voted into office, and have always relinquished it peacefully when voted out again. None of them has ever made war on free markets, even in attempting (often all too hesitantly) to impose prudent and ethically salutary regulations on business. Rather than gulags, death camps, secret police, arrests without warrant, summary executions, enormous propaganda machines, killing fields, and the like, their political achievements have been more in the line of the milk-allowances given to British children in the post-war years, various national health services, free eyeglasses and orthodonture for children, school lunches, public pensions for the elderly and the disabled, humane public housing, adequate unemployment insurance, sane labor protections, and so forth, all of which have been accomplished without irreparable harm to economies or treasuries.
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Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
www.commonwealmagazine.org/...
and if you needed more contemporary examples.
Former White House counsel Donald McGahn can defy a congressional subpoena, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled Friday in a decision siding with President Trump, who had blocked top advisers from testifying as part of the impeachment proceedings.
The 2-to-1 ruling, which can be appealed, deals a sweeping blow to Congress’s investigative powers. The decision means Trump’s former lawyer cannot be compelled to appear on Capitol Hill, and it comes after Democrats lost their bid to call additional witnesses during Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.
The Justice Department had argued the Constitution categorically bars the courts from stepping into this kind of dispute between the politically elected legislative and executive branches.
- The size of the crowd outside. The size of the crowd inside. The size of an unnamed Democrat's crowd down the road. The fake news. The number of cameras at this rally.
- Trump repeats his now-standard rally lines about the accomplishments of the administration and how his radical, sinister, corrupt, "far left. opponents are trying to destroy it all, "very dishonest people."
- Trump accuses Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus, prompting boos. A few sentences later, he says, "They have no clue. They can't even count their votes in Iowa."
- Trump says, "Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never, ever been unified like it is now."
- Trump claims the press is in "hysteria mode" about the coronavirus, singling out CNN and then lying that CNN just turned its camera off. "Turn it back on," he demands.
- Trump has moved on from criticizing the media and Democrats over the coronavirus to criticizing the Oscars for naming South Korean film Parasite Best Picture, asking again, "What's that all about?" A man shouts that it's garbage. Trump laughs and says, "He said it's garbage."
- Trump has returned to the coronavirus from how Parasite shouldn't have been Best Picture. He says "we are magnificently organized" for the virus, "totally ready."
- Trump: "This does show you. Things happen. Who ever thought of this? Two weeks ago, who would have thought this could be going on? For weeks ago? But things happen in life."
- This is standard Rally Trump except it's about the novel coronavirus.
- Trump: "Border security is also health security." He boasts about the wall, then says he'll do everything he can to keep people carrying "the infection" from entering the country. (We know of no cases in which someone has walked over from Mexico with the virus.)
- Trump is now doing a coronavirus-related remix of his usual borders attack on Democrats, saying "you see" with the coronavirus how their policies threaten the health of Americans.
- Now Trump is talking about how he met with black leaders yesterday. "One of the things I asked 'em -- and I've been thinking about this for a long time...'Do you like the name African American, or black?' And they said 'BLACK.' All at the same time."
- The president says of Comcast: "I'll do everything possible to destroy their image."
- Trump says he'll upset the media by talking about being president for nine or 13 or 18 more years. He then gets up to 21. He adds, "Let's term-limit ourselves at 25 years."
- Trump began to attack NBC for something about its coverage of his meeting with black leaders yesterday, but he got distracted by attacking parent Comcast and then by talking about being president for 25 years and never finished.
- Trump, who was mocked for mispronouncing words and mixing up a famous CEO's name on his trip to India, asks if you can imagine what would happen if he made a fraction of the mistakes Biden makes in speeches.
- Trump boasts briefly about the economy, then mocks various Democrats using disparaging nicknames.
- Elizabeth Warren is not dumb, Trump says, but is "mean."
- Trump polls the crowd on who is the weakest Democrat in the field, so he can decide whom to advise them to go vote for in the Democratic primary tomorrow. The crowd cheers by far the loudest for Bernie Sanders.
- We're on the "Indian blood" portion of the proceedings.
- Trump is complaining at some length that some of the applause at his events is sometimes described as "a smattering." He says it's far more than a smattering.
- Trump says that "in the last year" prescription drug prices fell "for the first time in 51 years." No. By one measure but not others, they fell in 2018 for the first time in 46 years. By the same measure, they rose in 2019.
- Sen. Lindsey Graham is speaking, thanking Trump for a list of things. He concludes by thanking Trump for dealing with "never-ending bullshit."
- Sen. Tim Scott gets the crowd to "scream" for South Carolina being "Trump country," if they have "benefited from the Trump economy," and if they want four more years.
- Trump is telling a detailed story about what a Medal of Honor recipient went through before dying. "Those are tough deals," he says of situations that result in people getting the Medal of Honor.
- Trump is reciting his standard economic boasts about various unemployment, income and poverty records, most of them true.
- Trump: "We expect to win a historic share of the black vote come election day."