The Simpsons were joking on exactly this censorship happening 30 years ago, so I don't think it's caused by social media.

This kind of censorship feels very (US-)american to much of the rest of the world. As someone who grew up in a catholic Hinterland, I am pretty sure the roots of the whole prudery come from organized religion.

Injecting people with shameful feelings about their most private (and most natural) parts of their lives is truly powerful. If you get the followers of your religion to see sexuality and nudity as something deeply shameful in the eyes of god, they will think about your religion before, during and after each slightly sexual encounter — you truly own them.

While in most catholic parts of Europe this kind of prudity became increasingly outdated during the last half of the century — to a degree where even my catholic Hinterland has no problem with topless women at the lake, my feeling is that the prude mindset runs much deeper in big parts of the US, Hinterland or not.

The overly prude censorship from the "freedom of speech"-nation was always somewhat surprising to Europeans. But only with the spread of (US-owned) social media platforms this became truly apparant. Shock! A female nipple! Censorship! Banned!

I'd argue that the rules of social media get internalized in society as well and that in a somewhat ironic sense this is making everyone more prude.

Your argument would be valid if catholicism or christianity in general would either grow or remain the same througout the western masses, which is not true. The only places in the world where christianity is growing is asia (most noticeably) and probably africa but there's less data for that.

You're right in saying this is mostly common to the american society(which itself propagated to the rest of the world), but I'm doubtful about the implied cause of organized religion. At least in europe this has not been the case for what, a century?

I don't actually feel this is a particularly modern thing, this has happened before with 1920s prohibition, McCarthyism, the war on drugs, etc.

It seems to be one of the weaknesses of American democracy, that a minority can enforce their will on a majority by sparking some sort of moral outrage that most voters don't actually share.

Not sure what exactly causes it. If it's the electoral college system, the senator system, the belief in laissez-faire capitalism, the American "dream", the lack of history, or what.

Maybe European democracies are just as vulnerable to it, but I'm just not as exposed to their news as I am to American news and it's something completely different.

But, for example, in the UK we had Mary Whitehouse who tried this tactic but it was generally ineffective.

Be interested to know if anyone's seen any good social or political explanations of it?

Probably the puritanical background and history of the US more than any particular structure.

In the article's example, it doesn't seem many of your points would apply. The school board is elected at the local level which rules out a good bit of those.

There's also the possibility that the voters/parents don't care about the nudity, but rather empathy about the lack of notification. They probably want to be notified of other sensitive topics and see the utility in such a policy in general. That was the real issue here.

Coming back to structure though. The biggest thing leading to outsized impact of minority groups are primaries. Primaries have such a low voter turnout that a minority group can have an outsized impact. To exacerbate this even further for the president, that only has to happen in the first few states for other candidates to drop out due to the staggered primary dates. So you end up with about 20% of voters in the first 10 states or so deciding who the main two candidates will be for president. The two party structure also contributes to the polarization as candidates are more concerned about opposition to a single party rather than alliances with other parties.

I think the two party system causes a lot of problems like this. Over time, a certain party has drifted towards an extreme that if the same happened in a European multiparty democracy, this party would have been replaced by one of the many similar, but sane parties.

Doubt so. Many of my Asian collegues aghast seeing Euro zone commiting economic suicide. Without Putin cheap energy, Russo-Indo-Sino-African huge market, plus extreme competitions from Chinese+Indian, Euro will not be prosperous. There was one centuries old company in Germany collapse bankrupt because of the support of Ukraine causing economic downturn. All my colleagues and friends in high places private side are finalizing retrenchment and liiquidation for coming quarters. Everyone of then blame it on stupid government policies of supporting Ukraine. Euro political parties arent that independent from controls of Dems and Rep in USA. As sanity, if you are having Asian views, none would use the wording sane to describe any of Euro parties.

It's been around a long time, but a major contribution to the worsening of late is the US news media. When my family visited the us in the early 2000s we thought fox news was a parody at first. We could not believe it was being held up as news, when the bias, and outright misinformation was passed off as fact. This platform was used with great effect to seed mistrust in all media, and now it's completely polarised, with most folks refusing to look at certain media sources as they can't be trusted. Other countries regulate the media, news is much closer to fact. News media can and does get sanctioned for any wrong information and have to publicly retract, etc. There are solutions, but the US doesn't want them.

Now social media is here, it's made it a lot worse and more global, but the US had an opportunity in the 90s and 2000s to improve it's media and did not.

The first amendment of the US Constitution makes it virtually impossible to pass any meaningful regulation of news media. As long as it's framed as opinion and not fact, these news outlets can say pretty much whatever they want.

> I don't actually feel this is a particularly modern thing, this has happened before with 1920s prohibition, McCarthyism, the war on drugs, etc.

Honestly the more I see about US history, it just feels like it’s always been like this.

This time is different. A small minority can brought in luggages of votes and use vote machines to change the elections outcome. We are witnessing the beginning of fall of Rome and Brits for America. You can see American society today are so dysfunctional that for the first time in history US military couldnt get enough recruit, male can walk into female changing room and beat any women sports simply by identifying as female gender. American Presidency now actively giving free money to Ukraine rather than helping veterans avoiding suicide or San Fran homeless from shitting on the road side and pricking themselves with needles. When banks collapse because of excessive risk taking, US government is quick to bailout regardless if they have the financial means to do so because they can just print money at will (when Rome, Mongol and Brits fell, excessive money printing was one of the core factors of their downfall). The easiest explaination for what American going through now is basically they are at the end of their dynasty and losing mandate from heaven. Anything else is just side commentaries. We just have to wait for a big war say Russo-Ametican nuke war of Sino-American to mark the end. Hopefully we wont see nuke wars playing out. But seeing John Titor's description of his own timeline, plus karma thing, I am betting America will get nuked sometime in future.