America: Not Actually a Den of Intolerance

By Judson Berger

Friday, February 11, 2022

 

Resentment of country is a time-honored tradition in the folds of any population, notably among the young and dormbound. We all do it sometimes.

 

But this stat surprised me:

 

Among some 1,500 people asked at the end of 2021, nearly a quarter of those who voted for Mr Biden in the 2020 election said that on matters of gay rights America ranks towards the bottom compared with the rest of the world. Only 8% of Trump voters placed America so low.

 

To those Biden voters, one might ask: Have you seen the rest of the world? As the Economist report notes, a Williams Institute study on LGBT acceptance ranked the U.S. quite high globally — No. 23 out of 175, to be precise.

 

To be sure, members of each party trend toward gloom on certain triggering subjects and even toward misplaced optimism, but there is this unique tendency on the left to dramatize America’s ills relative to ills abroad. The pall-colored glasses help explain the staggeringly incorrect claim — based on a limited comparison and since abandoned — by Representative Pramila Jayapal last year that “our poverty rate is the 4th highest in the world.” A stat too bad to check. I share David Harsanyi’s astonishment that an elected official could think even for a second that this is true. It is revealing.

 

Progressives want “progress,” and perhaps their impatience shows. Ex-Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum wrote last year that this desire is what’s really driving our culture wars: “Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.”

 

But progress is relative, and America has made much of it.