Yes I was thinking about demographics, and I agree about land mass as well. Being an island has distinctive properties itself. Though I think it's probably mostly just that, distinctive, I think it's significant when considering the historical development of a culture.LittleRaven wrote: ↑Fri Jun 14, 2019 9:57 pmAnd that's not even getting into the HUGE differences that we have in geography and demographics.BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Fri Jun 14, 2019 7:37 pmFrom what I can make of it, our affinity for a limited overarching federal government seemed to make for more of a need for a superconservative culture where guns become an essential fabric for survival and free speech also becomes an essential tool in the arsenal to shit talk the government.
The United Kingdom has 65 million people living in ~81 thousand square miles.The US has 330 million people living in ~3.8 million square miles. So right off the bat, we're going to have radically different needs from our governments, if only because we live in very different ways. As Riedquat was lamenting in a different thread, in the UK, you're almost never more than a few thousand feet from another human being...in fact, you're generally within a few thousand feet of a LOT of human beings. Here in the US, although we have plenty of densely populated places, we also have tons of place where you can be dozens of miles from the next person if you feel the need to get away. There's not many places like that in Britain, and when you live in a country where a crowded theatre is never far away, making sure that people don't cry fire is perhaps a bigger issue than it is here.
And then there's the issue of diversity. The British population is...to American eyes, anyway...almost unbelievably homogeneous. Over 90% of their population is white...and not 'American White,' which is a huge grab-bag of various ethnicities, but British-born white. America, by contrast, is only 70% white, and we only hit that by calling most Hispanics 'white.' About 70% of the British population is Protestant, followed by 20% non-responsive and tiny populations of other religions after that. Here in the States, our biggest religious group (Protestant) tops out below 50%, with Catholics weighing in at 23%, and sizable populations of Jews, Mormons, Pagans, and Muslims. In short, the US is way, WAY more diverse than Britain, and yet Brexit, which is absolutely tearing the British government apart, appears to be driven largely by concerns about 'losing British identity.' I'm not at all convinced you could implement British-style society in the US without the country flying apart...the UK is barely holding together in light of globalization, much less a truly diverse population.
So yeah, different systems for different people, which is probably the best solution we can hope for.
As far as vast land masses and conservative developments though, I wonder how Russia's and Brazil's compare to the US's. This of course is respect to the authoritarian/libertarian dynamic that leads to conservative adoption of say guns. China I think is safe to say that they've had a strong authoritarian presence, but I'm scared to ask about that considering how large and complicated their history is.
The fact you have been conditioned to like it that way is just ... sad. Same as accepting all the limitations on freedom of speech. Actually that part is so bad, you and the lefties here don't seem to really understand the fact that popular speech isn't the kind of speech that has to be protected, and that what's popular can change.
