This plot from the Financial Times has been getting a lot of attention online. The data come from the World Values Survey (slightly incorrectly cited in the plot).
I don’t know what to make of it exactly, except to say that it supports my gut belief that Germany, more than any other country, understood after the Second World War, what it takes to cultivate a spirit of freedom and democracy. It was a long struggle, and they didn’t shy away from it. Education, the legal system, journalism: It’s the famous German thoroughness, applied to the problem of creating free citizens. The British, the Americans, and the French, each in their own way, considered democracy to be their inevitable birthright, and so have allowed relevant institutional arrangements and, even more importantly, the democratic spirit, to decay.
Maybe the Americans are just being more honest — in a Trumpian anti-PC way. Taboos are important. One important lessons that the Nazis understood was: Before you can commit unspeakable horrors, you need to find a way to make them speakable.
Common Infirmities 