>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
> 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.