Is the U.S. Crazy?

[pampango]

11. Americans don't see "the intimate connection between a country’s domestic and foreign policies"

often trace America’s reckless conduct abroad to its refusal to put its own house in order. They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its organized labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and fearful. They understand as well why so many Americans have lost trust in a government that has done so little new for them over the past three decades or more, except for Obama’s endlessly embattled health care effort, which seems to most Europeans a pathetically modest proposal.

What baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich. In Norway’s capital, where a statue of a contemplative President Roosevelt overlooks the harbor, many America-watchers think he may have been the last U.S. president who understood and could explain to the citizenry what government might do for all of them. Struggling Americans, having forgotten all that, take aim at unknown enemies far away -- or on the far side of their own towns.

The countries that take the best care of their own citizens also do the most for the rest of the world. They see those policies as linked - "the intimate connection between a country’s domestic and foreign policies". The countries that do little for their own citizens do less good and much evil for the rest of the world.

I was asked here last week whether I lived overseas, as if experience in or knowledge of how progressive countries handle issues like taxes, regulation, safety net and trade are not welcome in liberal American politics. American exceptionalism rearing its head again.