Well, for starters, a lot of Americans believe that their government doesn’t restrict the ability of the people to own firearms. It does. The same people tend to believe that citizens of other countries don’t have the right to bear arms.
People in many other countries know that our governments restrict that ability. Sometimes the restrictions get updated. So do the taxation tables or the legislation on labor safety. It’s considered part of the job of the government.
A lot of the Argentinian displacement took place right after independence, under heavy influence from the UK. Or so I’ve been told by an Argentinian friend who’s a history buff, don’t have cites handy.
The vast majority of Americans are pretty similar to you. I do happen to support our gun rights, although I don’t own a firearm. But I’m not vocal about it, and most people aren’t vocal about, but there’s a very vocal group that makes us all seem like gun nuts. I assure you, were aren’t!
I’ve been to several countries like you describe, and have spent appreciable time specifically in South Africa and New Zealand, and putting aside the superficial differences, all three of us are very, very similar in spirit, attitudes, and way of life. And FWIW, I think the South Africans really are gun nuts!
The origins of European vs. US healthcare systems are well documented. National health insurance began in Germany because a crashing economy and the worrying example of a recent uprising in France was threatening major social unrest. Bismarck offered his program, under the lively name of Krankenversicherungsgesetz, in order to swipe some political turf from the country’s leftist parties. The US experienced the same economic disruption around that time, but it was much more rural at that time and had no workers’ party in a position to seek power, so there was no similar impetus to steal a march on a socialist program.
US health insurance developed into an employer-based model after WWII because marginal income tax rates were historically quite high, and a quirk of the tax code made health insurance a perk that could be provided to employees tax-free. Both models persist because of path dependence and the fact that most voters are generally satisfied (at least to appoint where they’re not prepared to make a large-scale change). I’m not sure that any deeper explanation is necessary.
Other issues have similarly traceable histories, which are likely to vary by issue.
There is plenty of useless/unpopulated space in the U.S. I think there are about ten states that have fewer people than the city I live in.
This unpopulated space, however, makes geographic representation of politics very distorted.
Think of the typical electoral map, with each state being red and blue, and you go ‘Wow, look at how many people voted red!’.
Except you’re actually looking at a false image: you can’t see cities on a map that shows the U.S. (Heck, you can’t even see Rhode Island) and so the visual impression of how people actually vote is wrong.
Yes, but not the majority of the country. You have to be someplace like Australia, Canada, Alaska, Siberia, or North Africa to have a situation where unpopulated areas are the norm and populated areas are the exception.
I’m fully in agreement with you on this one. Despite what some people argue (because they like the results) states don’t vote and square miles don’t vote. People vote. And people are not evenly distributed.
I think race is a big factor too. Having to dehumanize an entire race to justify mistreating them has fucked our culture up, especially in the South. Do other developed nations with a long history of slavery have similar issues? An abuser/abusee relationship fucks the abuser up too. It makes them irrational, paranoid and mean.
Paul Krugman said the US has always lagged Europe in things like a social safety net. Didn’t France and the UK Institute old age pensions 30-40 years before the US?
Based on comparing the US to other countries on a number of metrics, I would say that a key factor is our history with slavery. This has caused a large percentage of the population to start from a position of having no education, no money, and then were left trying to correct for that in a country that, for most of the following history, was more interested in continuing to keep them away from education and wealth than help them overcome that start point.
In general, if you average the UK and South Africa on some metric, at a 3:1 ratio, you get a number close to the USA.
Guns are not meaningful to any metric. They’re barely even well-correlated to gun homicides, which is a nonsense statistic to begin with. Gun ownership is negatively correlated to homicide rates.
These are good explanations. I’d add to #1 and #3 that it resulted in a very diverse population which doesn’t have the same kind of strong ethnic identity as most other countries.
#2 is especially important, we have long coastlines on two oceans, and long borders with just two other countries that we don’t find threatening.
