> but that maybe the American people are out of step with how to effectively conduct a democracy?
I'm a believer in procedural democracy. Within limits--with those limits themselves having public endorsement--democracy means that people should have the kind of society the people want. I don't think the only kind of democracy is secular, liberal democracy: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/de....
> Democrats are to the right of most lawyers, sure - but the Democratic party would be considered right wing in most other western democracies. America is so right-leaning that being a centrist in a global sense makes you more to the left than our left wing party.
On economic issues yes, but not on social and cultural issues. France is to the right of America on each of the issues I listed above except public religion. For example, France's abortion law (which generally bars abortions after 14 weeks) would not survive under Roe (which requires abortion to be generally available up to viability, which is 22-24 weeks). On color blindness versus race consciousness, centrist Macron is far to the right of American progressives: https://wset.com/news/nation-world/france-denounces-american.... Macron, in fact, has specifically attacked "woke" progressive ideology.
The only exception is religion--France is aggressively secular. But France is the exception on that front. For example, the UK still technically requires all schools to have daily prayers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer#United_Kingdom. That law would be unconstitutional in the U.S. Likewise, public funding for religious schooling, which is common in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc., would be unconstitutional in the U.S. In another example, in Bavaria it is mandatory to display a cross on public buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreuzpflicht. By contrast, in the U.S. there was a big kerfuffle recently about whether it was permissible to have a cross sculpture on public property.
> I think that the Reagan Era ushered in a wave of cultural conservatism that is far out of step with a healthy democracy
I think you have to separate two things. First, how culturally conservative are the people? Second, how responsive is the legal system to those views?
America has always been extremely religious, like all the other New World countries. The percentage of Americans who pray daily is comparable to Iran. And as a practical matter, the religiosity of Americans is continually replenished by immigration. Folks who come here from Latin America, Asia, etc., may vote Democrat, but often they're quite culturally conservative.
Reagan didn't make America culturally conservative--he made the legal system more responsive to people's cultural conservatism. During a period in the mid-20th century, lawyers--who represent an elite slice of society--had departed quite significantly from the moral center of the country, and Reagan turned that back.
The interesting thing when you compare to Europe is that the legal system in those countries is much more responsive to the public on issues of morality than the U.S. legal system. Social change happens in those countries through popular legislation, not court rulings. For example, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found that the express "right to marriage" contained in the European Convention on Human Rights did not extend to same-sex marriage. They did that the year after the U.S. Supreme Court reached the exact opposite conclusion about the U.S. Constitution's implied marriage right. (Countries less religious than the U.S., such as Italy, Greece, and Switzerland, still don't have same-sex marriage as of 2022.) Likewise, European courts have consistently deferred to legislatures on issues such as abortion laws.
The U.S. may often seem very conservative because the U.S. is much more like Poland than Denmark. But the legal system is actually aggressively liberal in overruling public opinion compared to the counterparts in Europe. Frankly, they remind me a little of Bangladesh, my home country. There, the country's elites have consistently tried to overrule the deeply-Islamic public in making secularism a central legal principle.