> secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation

I think most of these things are political rather than cultural. Specific laws take a variable amount of time to change/evolve, but are generally downstream of culture. Listing these kinds of political issues also tends to create a weird bias as you’re generally paying attention to the most extreme takes on all sides (e.g. you’ve listed access to abortion, but I would hardly consider this to be an indicator that the US was more culturally liberal than most of Europe pre-2022, just as I wouldn’t consider it an indicator that it is less culturally liberal post-2022,… it is more a political artifact than a genuine measure of culture).

"between the average of the US and the average of Europe"

I'm not sure how one even defines these. As an example, most of the examples you give have a near 50/50 (+/-10%) split here in the US.

> most of the examples you give have a near 50/50 (+/-10%) split here in the US.

That's what I mean. Many of those issues don't have anywhere near a 50/50 split in Europe, which is part of the definition of social norms, expectations and cultural values.

My bad, not average person, but average of the population. I got it. Although my statement still applies. You can look at voter breakdown by county to see a picture of how this 50/50 split is actually more homogeneous by locale. So there are cultural values, but they are at a more local level.

There's no 'average european culture' as inter-european differences are bigger than US-europe divide. The US is basically our common cultural base now.

> secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation

At least 4 of those issues are american , not european. this just goes to show how much attention europeans pay to the US issues instead of our own issues (aging of population, demographic deficit, unaffordable housing, unemployment , lack of global competitiveness, old money, brain drain etc). And what about european tech? I only discuss about it on HN, a californian forum.

> privacy

While these are interesting issues, they are nowhere near the top of the mind of average european person. Nobody went out on the streets because they wanted cookie prompts. We are just letting bureaucrats run the show and tell us we should like it

Similarly, there is no average American culture, as inter-state differences in attitude are large. America is as polarized as it's ever been, which is another way of saying the same thing.

american culture is almost homogeneous. ask a european visitor

Oh no, Peruvian culture and Canadian culture, for example, are very distinctly different, at least to my Belgian eyes.

This isn't what they meant, but I suspect you know that.

and so are Italian and Finnish cultures. But inter-USA cultures are as differnt as local cultures are within a single european country.

Would be interesting to have a distance metric for cultures , however

Yeah, the Navajo and Lakota are very noticably culturally distinct from each other, maybe even more so than people from Swabia and people from North Frisia.

The Navajo and Lakota are nations.

> The US is basically our common cultural base now

This is wishful thinking. People pay a lot of attention to the US due to its cultural output and importance in geo-politics but when they open the door they still pay attention to their own locality which has its own context.

> At least 4 of those issues are american , not european.

I'm sorry, how are those issues not European? Do you think Europeans aren't human or something? They're social issues and its harmful to think the US has any sort of monopoly on them. I could easily pull concrete examples where those issues are relevant to European events that I might suggest you are unaware of.

> While these are interesting issues, they are nowhere near the top of the mind of average european.

I would argue that for an average European elector, privacy is a much greater expectation than it is for an American.

> how are those issues not European?

because they are not contested in europe, only in the US

> privacy is a much greater

It's nowhere near as important as housing or employment i think. Strict privacy was mainly championed by German Greens, not a pan-european issue

Sorry, but that's bullshit. Does US discourse have impact on these topics in Europe: sure. But they are not solved topics that wouldn't be contentious otherwise.

> because they are not contested in europe, only in the US

every single one of those issues gets discussed in Europe. The US does not have a monopoly on social issues, I fear you are just showing the limits of your perspective.

i dont think anyone seriously debates whether abortion should be outlawed in western europe. It's just not a political topic in almost all of europe. Some very conservative parties use the US hype to rally their own supporters but it's just not working as an issue, abortion is to a very large degree culturally acceptable.

Abortion in Poland is legal only in cases when the pregnancy is a result of a criminal act or when the woman's life or health is in danger.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Poland#Legal_sta...

Abortion ebbs and flows. As someone else mentioned, currently Poland has placed severe restrictions on it and Ireland only legalised it something like 20 years ago, N.Ireland only decriminalised it about 5 years ago.

I would also suggest that considering the miserable failure of the mid-terms that the US has a similar strong average relatively set against limiting access to abortion too. Although I do appreciate that some areas of the US are more traditionally religious areas and more similar to the conservatives in Poland.

Abortion was only legalized in Ireland in 2018.

Abortion is one of the few cultural topics which doesn't tend towards borad consensus. E.g. acceptance of gay rights has a tipping point and then drifts towards the 90s+%, but abortion does not.

It's still very limited in Ireland and it took the death of a pregnant woman to make this happen.

Her husband begged the doctors to terminate her pregnancy in order to save her life but he was told "this is a Catholic country".

I marched myself on this dark day in Galway but Ireland still has a long way to go to become truly independent from its Catholic stranglehold. That caused so much pain especially to the youth.

But they are on their way yes, I was especially happy when the gay marriage made it through.

You don't think Ireland is part of western Europe? You don't think Poland counts as part of Europe and the EU?

It would be interesting to setup a sort of “quiz” about the US for Europeans and vice versa for Americans, I bet both would get those political points vastly wrong (eg, they’d think abortion laws way stricter or lax than they actually are, same with guns, etc). Most of what you know about other places comes from the media depicting it.

>There's no 'average european culture

Where do you live? Are you not aware that there is a very active and ongoing war in Europe which was triggered by the desire of a certain country to be more "European", and opposition to that desire.

ukraine was and is a european country. it wanted to be allied to the west and nato though

Indeed, it recognised that being "European" was more than a geographical concept.

Note that in 2014 it was "Euro-maiden" not NATO-maiden, or West-maiden.

> Nobody went out on the streets because they wanted cookie prompts. We are just letting bureaucrats run the show and tell us we should like it

Umm I do advocate for privacy. And I know many people that do. Feelings about GDPR are generally very positive.

But nobody wanted cookie prompts. They are the result of a shortsighted compromise.

What the EU should have done is simply forbid user tracking or make the user take action if they want to be tracked, no not tracking should be the default. Pop-up questions should have been explicitly forbidden.

However the industry knows that nobody wants to be tracked. And feared a loss of income. So they campaigned to weaken the law. The EU officials in their stupidity agreed. Stupid yes because now the industry blames them for the abundant cookie walls.

Not stupid, sadly - corrupt. I bet most of the MEPs that voted on that directive are now retired with a fat pension, made even fatter by some "consulting gig" from the folks that wanted that law weakened.

Unfortunately this is nothing new. Democracy has its problems.

When I go back to France I see burgers sold everywhere and massively more English words, both compared to 20 years ago.

French culture has very noticeably diluted in that relatively short time.

Use of language does not necessarily result in entirely changing the culture. Take South East Asia for example where they simply have their own spin on the English language. I fear that what the Anglosphere sees in this case is what it wants to see, its own victory, where in practice the actual outcome is more complex and doesn't necessarily result (in the long term) to the expectation.

Sure, foreign words are very often adapted.

But when you see for instance the cooking section of some French media renamed 'Food' that means something... or at least that the editor is an idiot.

Was American culture "diluted" when pizza became popular in the mid-20th century?

> There's a clear cultural divide between the average of the US and the average of Europe on many topics

This is very apparent to me reading HN late at night my time, which is mid-morning Europe time. It's like there are two totally different groups here. (We don't all think alike, of course, but there are prevailing views that tend to get upvoted. What's interesting to me is how it shifts with time!)

> if the EU is so "dead" then why do US manufacturers respect its regulations?

What does culture have to do with companies wanting the European money?

> For example there's clear differences on secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation.

I think this is a common Anglo-American outlook that thinks that generic European is the ultimate expression of Democrat (or Blairite Labour/LibDem). There are plenty of reactionary Europeans, and since they're not completely bound to US right-left ideologies there are plenty of examples of e.g. race-realist environmentalists, or anti-abortion socialists.

edit: I mean, you've offered a literal list of US wedge issues, and assumed that Europe takes the Democratic Party position on them.

> For example; if the EU is so "dead" then why do US manufacturers respect its regulations?

I don't want to take a side on this one, but is your argument here really that US capitalists have high philosophical standards on what market they'll enter?