Reddit reviews European Dictatorships 1918-1945

U.S. Citizen here.

• I have health care through my job.
  
• Never been shot at, never met anyone who has, although I saw a kid get kicked 12 feet through the air by a horse once, and he nearly died.
  
• Never suffered any form of discrimination. I work with brilliant and respected women, ethnic minorities, and U.S. immigrants, and all of them are treated as peers (and often superiors) by their white male colleagues. We go out of our way to find qualified diverse candidates for all of our positions, and then have to compete aggressively for them, because there is such a low unemployment rate.
  
• Was born in poverty, got federal financial aid to allow me to go to a state college. Worked hard, got through grad school on scholarships, and now I have a good job and have paid off all of my college debt (see also: insurance).
  
• One of my siblings runs a state of the art child care facility, leveraging their graduate degree in cognitive development to help people raise well tempered kids who have the social confidence to solve their own problems collaboratively, rather than employing arbitrary adult authority. Sibling came from the same poverty level that I did, worked hard, and now lives a very happy life.
  
• Everyone I know cares deeply about the environment. We keep our neighborhoods clean and free of trash. My vehicle gets 45 mpg on the freeway, and I don't have a daily commute to my job.
  
• My community employs over 2300 people in full time renewable energy and energy efficiency R&D, with an annual budget of around half of a billion dollars.
  
• The U.S. leads the world in Nobel prize awards. We are home to hundreds of individual award recipients, and a very significant number of them were not born here, but came here in their childhoods or early in their careers, because contrary to what you might have read, by a wide margin, the U.S. has more immigrants than any other country in the world.
  
• Our democratic form of government allows us to peacefully transfer executive power every 4 years, and we have successfully done so for over 240 years. Our two party system is the world's best known mechanism for marginalizing extreme political viewpoints, preventing them from codifying into law. Let's compare that to the track record European parliamentary democracies. In the early 1920s, most of Europe's 28 states could be described as parliamentary democracies. By 1939, 16 of them had succumbed to dictatorships. By 1941, only 5 of them remained intact. I recommend "The European Dictatorships 1918-1945" by Stephen J. Lee for a deeper delve into exactly why the parliamentary form of government is so susceptible to extremism.
  
  I know we're not a perfect country, but damnit, nearly all of the people here are good, honest, hard working, caring, courteous, want clean air and water, and to help people. But we also tend to keep our heads down and favor getting real shit done (via science, R&D, and business) rather than trying to kick around the political football every waking moment of our lives. I think our biggest weaknesses are that we aren't generally any good (yet) at addressing mental health issues for the general public, which causes a lot of people to have to grapple with their mental illnesses and addictions alone. But there's a robust national conversation happening about that. We also have a culture of overwork, which exacerbates physical and mental health issues, and actually diminishes our ability to strengthen the social ties that keep our communities strong. Finally, we haven't figured out how to effectively mobilize the vast concentrated sums of wealth that our business leaders are able to accumulate, without causing moral hazard at the bottom of the economic ladder, but we have 50 states competing to figure out the best ways to do that.

U.S. Citizen here.

• I have health care through my job, and it's usually damn good most of the time.
  
• Never been shot at, never met anyone who has, although I saw a kid get kicked 12 feet through the air by a horse once, and he nearly died.
  
• Never suffered any form of discrimination. I work with brilliant and respected women, ethnic minorities, and U.S. immigrants, and all of them are treated as peers (and often superiors) by their white male colleagues. We go out of our way to find qualified diverse candidates for all of our positions, and then have to compete aggressively for them, because there is such a low unemployment rate.
  
• Was born in poverty, got federal financial aid to allow me to go to a state college. Worked hard, got through grad school on scholarships, and now I have a good job and have paid off all of my college debt (see also: insurance).
  
• One of my siblings runs a state of the art child care facility, leveraging their graduate degree in cognitive development to help people raise well tempered kids who have the social confidence to solve their own problems collaboratively, rather than employing arbitrary adult authority. Sibling came from the same poverty level that I did, worked hard, and now lives a very happy life.
  
• Everyone I know cares deeply about the environment. We keep our neighborhoods clean and free of trash. My vehicle gets 45 mpg on the freeway, and I don't have a daily commute to my job.
  
• My community employs over 2300 people in full time renewable energy and energy efficiency R&D, with an annual budget of around half of a billion dollars.
  
• The U.S. leads the world in Nobel prize awards. We are home to hundreds of individual award recipients, and a very significant number of them were not born here, but came here in their childhoods or early in their careers, because contrary to what you might have read, by a wide margin, the U.S. has more immigrants than any other country in the world.
  
• Our democratic form of government allows us to peacefully transfer executive power every 4 years, and we have successfully done so for over 240 years. Our two party system is the world's best known mechanism for marginalizing extreme political viewpoints, preventing them from codifying into law. Let's compare that to the track record European parliamentary democracies. In the early 1920s, most of Europe's 28 states could be described as parliamentary democracies. By 1939, 16 of them had succumbed to dictatorships. By 1941, only 5 of them remained intact. I recommend "The European Dictatorships 1918-1945" by Stephen J. Lee for a deeper delve into exactly why the parliamentary form of government is so susceptible to extremism.
  
  America has it's problems, many problems even, however to call us a shithole is simply disingenuous.
  
  /rantover