Joined: 10 May 2005 Age: 42 Gender: Female Posts: 7,245
10 Nov 2016, 10:35 pm
But of course, Americans hate the thought of having to learn from the rest of the world. America is the teacher, so sit down and shut up! Americans like to say.
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Unfortunately, too many people consider the very idea of looking for answers overseas as daft. I’m accustomed to watching California audiences tune me out when I give talks about how other countries do elections or budgeting better than we do. Singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow has been mocked for circulating a petition to limit the poison of endless electoral politics and adopt a shorter election cycle, as in Canada and Great Britain. And elected officials who go overseas to learn more about democracy are pilloried for taking “junkets.”
I find this cynicism dispiriting and surprising. Californians are quick to embrace culture or technologies from around the world. But we have the opposite attitude when it comes to democracy. We are convinced that our system is so distinctive that the world has little to say to us.
But this election shows the problems our democratic institutions currently have:
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Our reluctance makes even less sense after this election. Nearly every democratic institution in this country – the presidency, Congress, law enforcement, state election officials, the media – lost credibility in 2016. In California, our first open U.S. Senate seat in a generation produced a desultory race, and we turned direct democracy into a mess of 17 confusing statewide initiatives.
Despite widespread disillusionment with aspects of our democracy, there are few big reforms being advanced. We’re not looking far and wide enough for them, and so our insularity enfeebles us.
Unfortunately, Americans like to believe that we're the only liberal democracy in the world, and the rest of the world is a bunch of dictatorships or something.
And as the comments showed, if an American talks about moving to another country because of unhappiness with other policies, the response is dismissive, "Bye! Have a nice life" (Dan Regelin in the comments), or as Allison Christians reported, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out":
What is this country's problem? Why the arrogant, nasty attitude toward other countries and Americans who think that maybe other countries do something better than us or that they'd prefer to live in another country?
_________________ "You have a responsibility to consider all sides of a problem and a responsibility to make a judgment and a responsibility to care for all involved." --Ian Danskin
10 Nov 2016, 10:35 pm
