zlacker

Americans and Europeans are both right about their own situation, because most European countries have functioning political systems, so there is a good level of popular control over the functioning of the state. The same is absolutely not true in the US due to issues like the senate filibuster, lobbying, campaign financing, gerrymandering, first past the post, and surely others I’m not thinking of.

The US is best understood as a very flawed democracy, somewhere between the extremes of actual authoritarian states on the one hand and modern well-run European states on the other.

>>umanwi+(OP)
I don’t think that the European democracies are that better from the American one, maybe except for some of the smaller countries, but still I think the European mentality trusts their government more than the companies. For example, in most of the Europe, we have central governmental registry for addresses and IDs, and that kind of stuff. On the other hand Americans and the British argue against that kind of databases, and refused to have ID but their intelligence agencies are known to be very thorough on spying on them. Different ways of doing things I guess.