Principal resigns after Florida students shown Michelangelo statue (opens in new tab)

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While in most catholic parts of Europe this kind of prudity became increasingly outdated during the last half of the century — to a degree where even my catholic Hinterland has no problem with topless women at the lake, my feeling is that the prude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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Some Asian countries follow the blueprint of early 20th century's Western countries. Quick transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy, secularization, etc.