Bernie Sanders is leading the way.

The article talks near this point but not directly to it. In any given European country, one can argue that assistance helps that counrty. One can say, welfare helps France help the French. America lacks this. We do not identify as 'Americans', rather as 'White Americans' or 'Black Americans' ... and so on.

Until we identify as just 'Americans' it will be harder to get traction on social support nationally.

So I have a really good view of the cycles and you are too under informed to even discuss this with. You are just trying to force a narrative about voting for hopeless centrists. It's daft and not even logical.

their lifestyle is so boring and a waste of time.

I've lived, worked and taught in Europe. Have tons of colleagues who have done the same.

I have seen strong nationalist bent, as well as the much higher level of political engagement discussed in the OP.
Not sure where you think the OP is off base- could you please elaborate?

There is a reason why Europeans enjoy a higher standard of living and are happier with their lives.

of improving scare you so?

Dispassionate analysis of the differences between the US and Europe.

Bernie supporters are all passion and no thought, it seems. You remind of Donald Trump, sometime. He's going to Make America Great by the force of his personality, I guess. You're going to make America Europe, by the force of your revolutionary wishes.

maybe a movie would help you calm down. I could make some suggestions if you'ld like. But either way have a lovely day.

that was presumptuous question with no basis in anything except your own unwillingness to start by looking reality in the face.

Question: Do you deny the difference between European and American rates of taxation?


Question: Do you deny that racial and ethnic division in America play a huge role in American politics?

Question: Do you deny that our stupid constitutional structure gives too much power to small rural states like Vermont and Wyoming, that don't reflect America at large?

Question: Do you deny that there is too much money in politics?

Question: Do you deny that the Central government in the US is weak and has limited powers, compared to European central governments?


Question: Do you deny that Americans, for one reason or another, don't vote?

Answer: And the US is the only place in the world to face, or in some cases run away from, these problems?

Answer: No denial here, they are given too much, but it's not as big of a problem as you make it out to be. Just look at the New Hampshire primary just last week, oh, right, you do think that's a problem.

Answer: Why would I support someone who has no 'Super PAC' if I didn't believe this? And by the way, remind me, where was Hillary last night?

Answer: Why would that matter when it refuses to do anything? Show me a government trying to accomplish anything, then we'll worry about whether it's strong enough or not.

Answer: The voting rates have been terrible. Now Question: Why do you hope they stay that way?

FWIW, I was #6. And I still stand by that, jury results notwithstanding.

Argle bargle derp derp.

no advocacy in this post for a particular political point of view. You seem allergic to any thought that might even give you a moment's pause in your wishful thinking.

More like oligarchy, corporatist .01%er apologista claptrap.

And add a large dose of derpity derp derp.

as the sheep who watch fox news everyday. only difference between you and them is that you are leftist sheep, while they are rightist sheep.

profanity is the last refuge of weak minds.

You really don't want change.

Do you already have yours and now want to snatch the ladder?

and you defend a system which has left millions hurting.
Think about it.

Where do you see a defense of our system in anything I said?

All that helps is the wealthy.

I will be in Europe in a month. I look forward to a place where the roads aren't crumbling and people are educated. The 3 weeks after that I go back to America where people are selfish assholes who hate paying taxes and hate each other.

Yippee.

Every time I go to Europe and then come back to the US, I'm like, "And this is the greatest country in the world? Give me a break."

But Americans ARE crybabies about taxes. No way around it. You can't do politics with the people you want. You have to do politics with the people you have. We're stuck with Americans.

My only excuse is I am a little drunk, it being after 6:00 where I am .

because the "roads not crumbling" made me laugh out loud. I live here, and let me tell you, there are potholes and nasties that I'm afraid I'm going to loose my car....now I do have a mini clubman, so it is small. And when they are doing road work here...wow is all I have to say. I heard tell that the road that my street dumps into was closed for 2 years...it opened up about 6 months after we moved in. I think it's just Belgium though....Germany is pure sweetness on the Autobahn. I can always tell where one country begins and one ends

Let's start in reverse. Too much money in politics? High on Bernie's list of things to attempt to change. Not because it 'solves' any other problem, but because it makes it easier to get in politicians who are more interested in the needs of actual voters, rather than the needs of shareholders and corporations.

And guess what? Once you get more politicians running who actually care about voters, you get more voters who care about politics. People vote when they think it might actually make a change for the better in their lives. They're apathetic to the process when no matter which side they vote for, 93%+ of the benefits go to the rich.

And once voters start paying attention to higher level elections, they also start to pay more attention to lower level ones too, and we start getting better politicians there, too, working once again for humans, not businesses. Don't get me wrong, businesses are fine, but any benefits the government gives them should be DIRECTLY tied to the demonstrated benefits those businesses bring to humans in the community, not just how rich they make jet-set shareholders.

At which point we get to 'made for stasis'. Well, certainly made for slower change than in other places, but NOT for stasis. Stasis, or 'gridlock', is a dysfunctional state that derives from all of the above - crappy candidates who win on floods of money from rich people who elect them to make themselves richer. Get the money out, get better candidates running; get better candidates running, get voters less apathetic; get voters less apathetic, get in better candidates; get in better candidates, undo gerrymandering. It all flows right along.

Next, racial divisions. Yes, they exist, and they're the original sin of the country, and have been exploited since before the country WAS a country, again for the purpose of allowing the few to concentrate wealth and power, exploiting the powerless and setting the poor against each other. Telling one group that they're better than another so as to keep the groups antagonized against each other so that they don't team up against the few with all the power, all the wealth. And, as we see more and more ethnicities entering Europe in larger numbers, we see the same sorts of tensions springing up. In that sense, Europe is becoming more like America.

Finally, taxes. Yes, Europeans pay more in taxes. All Europeans. And they get a lot back for those taxes. Our problem as regards taxes is not structural, but conditioning. Rightwingers of all persuasions have been pushing the idea that taxes are 'evil' for decades, and have gotten a lot of help in pushing that idea simply because our government does NOT return all the benefits to all citizens, but instead funnels large amounts of the taxes into the pockets of the few. When Americans actually see the benefits of taxes, they are open to paying them. When that tax money is shoveled into the pockets of shareholders of military contractors, and no real benefits accrue to the rest of America, people get cranky about paying taxes. So we need to stop being the 'world police', and paying for foreign adventure after foreign adventure and boondoggles like the F35.

But it all starts where you ended. Break the ability of the rich to buy political races, and allow politicians who simply want to actually serve human beings to win elections.

Education! Get corporate interests out of the political process of education. This one will be more difficult, but it must be done. From charter schools to public schools. The entire system needs overhauled. NCLB and high stakes testing has hurt our system, and clearly lowered our rankings internationally. In order to compete with the best, we must first acknowledge they are better. Embrace what we can learn from them, and develop a new system to strengthen the future for our children. Or we will be in a world of problems in the future.

Antonin Scalia was most adamantly opposed to arguments about how foreign countries solved the same political problems that face America. He didn't want to learn from any other country's mistakes or experiences, but insisted that America repeat all of the mistakes others had made and moved on from.

You seem to think it's all about class warfare an the oligarchy blocking the will of the masses of America, dividing the people against themselves through the top down imposition false consciousness. Everything is about allowing the few to profit off the backs of the many, who if they just woke up and realized how united they were, would throw off the few.

Way to simple. Too many Americans hate other Americans. Too many Americans don't support redistributive policies because they think it redistributes what is theirs to "those people." And it's not just the doing of the wealthy elites that makes some people see other people as the undeserving other.

"Lower level" politics in is sweltering stew of all kinds of stuff that don't fit so nicely into your narrative of oligarchy. Fights of taxes and property values and crime and and sales taxes, and bond measures and traffic patterns and on and on on that in the aggregate have a huge effect on the structure and pace of America life. Sure monied interest are in there too, but just as one element among others.

And you are way too optimistic about the nature of our political system. Not without reason have few more recent democracies copied it. Read Linz -- The Perils of Presidentialism, for a nice critique of the limits of presidential democracy. Here:

http://scholar.harvard.edu/levitsky/files/1.1linz.pdf


Taxes are a big deal, infinitely more complicated than your simple narrative allows. First all, when you say no real benefits accrue to America but that they all go to shareholders (tax receipts to shareholders?) and military contractors, are you forgetting how much money we spend on entitlement programs already? Mostly benefit the old, to be sure. But they are a major constituency for the status quo. Can't get around that.

Problem with "politicians who serve human beings" is that human beings are intensely divided amongst themselves and very much at odds with one another.

I kept it simple to match the platform. And as a process, I expect it to take many decades. I'm not expecting everything I talked about to magically 'poof' into place, one after another, but to be a cycle that feeds on itself, getting better and better over many, many years. The opposite is the cycle we've SEEN play out over the last 40 years, where ever rightward-drifting Dems drive away voters and make them ever more apathetic, as they buy into RW ideas about politics and economics.

Beyond lame.

Essentially, your post reads like "America can't be like Europe because - list of fucked up (but fixable) shit - so don't vote for the guy who wants it to be more like Europe... because it can't be... because we're fucked up..."

Did I miss anything?

the conclusions and the inferences are your own.

Just a diagnosis of why America isn't like Europe and why wanting it to be so isn't sufficient.

Some of these things can be fixed, but would be hard to fix -- like constitutional amendments.

Some just take some legislative will.

Some would take a change in American culture.

You seem intellectually allergic to anything that doesn't feed into your preconceived notions and desires.

change, big ideas, hard work, and common good.

I love big ideas and hard work.

I love common ground.

Don't know where you get this stuff from.

that's where.

I think it boils down to the parliamentary system. Our system was designed to be different and designed to stop things from changing unless there was practically 100% support for the change.

but it is really a stupid system,don't you think?

I think the founding fathers did not anticipate how stupid it really was, because they did not anticipate the effects of combining this structure with extreme partisanship. It's bad enough on it's own, but when you add extremely divided parties to this structure, it's a disaster, dysfunction waiting to explode upon itself.

at the time. They had their own governments as colonies are did not want to give up power. I am from Delaware, one reason for the Senate. It was a little state and with other little states, fought to keep their power and knew that states with larger populations could outvote them. The Senate is anti-Democratic, with New York or California having as many Senators as Delaware or Wyoming. Then the filibuster! That tops it off. The Senate thus drags and is a huge ball and chain stopping changes from being made.

Trying to get high speed rail here in California is proving a nightmare.

A lot of NIMBYism.

poor substitutes

thing is in this country, you only get one chance often to get these things right. If you screw up, you're set back decades. So it's really, really important, if there is an opportunity to makes some progressive change, that you don't screw it up. Too many odds stacked against to blow the few real opportunities you get.

Was Walter Mondale. He won one state. His home state MN.

never raise taxes, or raise taxes, but never be honest about it? Is that the eternal, inviolate lesson of that moment in time?

lots of reason Americans are allergic to taxes. Can't pretend that they aren't. If you've got a cure for the allergy, good. But notice that everyone who has said they would raise taxes has excluded the middle class. the middle class in America thinks that it is WAY overtaxed. Relative to Europe, our middle class is extremely under-taxed. To support a European style welfare state, you'd have to tax the middle class and tax it heavily.

Try selling that to the middle class. Try selling a VAT in America.

and pay First World wages.

By and large, I think Americans would be willing to pay more in taxes if their jobs paid more and weren't under constant threat via union-busting, "downsizing" and off-shoring.

Remember the part of his campaign about "Letting the Bush tax cuts expire"?

Let's raise taxes back to where we are sustainable again.

how so?

In reality it isn't that simple. While borders may be fluid and they may share a common currency, there are STRONG divisions on how governance in general should be made from country to country and even area to area within those countries.

but the Europeans -- especially the Western ones -- did opt for much more egalitarian states, with a much larger safety net than you find in America.

Why is that? that's the only question I'm thinking about.

" But fortunately for them, they started building their massive welfare states, long before the dark-skinned other was knocking so incessantly at their doors, clamoring to get in."

that's calling the Europeans racists, but saying that they got to build their massive welfare states, before their racism and xenophobia was shoved in their faces, but the tide of immigrants they are now facing.

European politics is getting uglier and uglier these days.

on a GDP basis

We spend 50-100% more on healthcare than European countries on a per capita basis. Employer health insurance serves as a drag on economy as it limits mobility.

We waste billions of dollars (probably on the order of $100B/yr.) on grants and defaulted loans to post secondary institutions that do not prepare their students to improve their income. In addition the loan system serves as a drag on the economy.

We do recoup the cost of externalities (such as coal fired power plants, autos, and pollution) as effectively as the European countries.

We maintain and perpetuate a caste system based on race.

Remember when John Anderson proposed a 50 cents per gallon tax on gasoline way back when in the 1980s? That idea went nowhere, And federal taxes on gasoline -- deep into the age of global warming --- are still negligible.

Time to change that.

or are you just being dramatic?

Do a classic cost benefit analysis of the "social good" derived from the two approaches to wealth distribution. How much relative disposable income do you think the two approaches to taxation leaves to the bottom 60% of the population?

it does see itself as having a community of interest. If it was, there wouldn't be all those Reagan democrats, for example, who saw themselves as more aligned in their overall interests with the corporate sector than with, say, black Americans or the poor more generally.

...in the form of a social safety net that removes financial anxiety and opens the door to at least somewhat equal opportunity for our children, then it becomes monolithic.

universal benefits, not benefits that appear to be focused on this race or that, was the way to make people more receptive to the welfare state. He wanted to de-racialize the safety net -- thus end welfare as we know it.

problem was that the racialized safety net always was a myth.

I see what you mean but your framing seems to me like whistling past a graveyard. There is something you don't want to think about and you're trying to distract yourself.

He dismantled the social safety net and felt everyone's pain. Maybe he suffers from a rare, hitherto unknown form of sado-masochism,

explains a lot of differences between our approach to urban life and the French

Let's see 2015 Happiest Countries:

Switzerland
Iceland
Denmark
Norway
Canada
Finland
Netherlands
Sweden
New Zealand
Australia
Israel
Costa Rica
Austria


Now what do those top countries have that we don't - higher taxes!

But who wants to be happy when we can pay less taxes, not be able to afford college, pay so much in health insurance, don't have paid vacation, family leave, maternity leave, and so much more? Gee I wonder if we made a graph of taxes in these other countries - then our taxes plus all those other things we pay for that they have included in their taxes - which do you think would be higher on the graph?

America would appear very low on the graph. And I suspect that's one of the many reasons why we are a low tax country. American's don't trust the government to do good things with their tax dollars. Not sure how to change that. I mean which comes first -- support for higher taxes that enables the government to do more good things, but that requires trust in government. But the government can't earn that trust until it shows that it can do good things with our tax dollars.

But given how unresponsive our government is -- because of the built in structural constraints combined with the hyper partisanship --- building trust in government here is a dicey proposition.

government provides for them, but some, that I met, weren't real happy with all the high taxes. They did some funny things....one being cars (not sure if they still do this). Work vehicles, such as van that hold only X amount of people, were taxed at a cheaper rate than personal vehicles. These work vehicles had yellow license plates. I notice that some fancy cars and fancy SUVs also had yellow plates...these cars didn't have back seats, and some sort of cage/barrier thing between the front seat and the back of the vehicle. Because they had no back seat they were considered "work" vehicles and taxed at the cheaper rate. Why would someone want a Mercedes that could only seat 2, but was made for 5...made me laugh.

always try to find ways to work the system...I just thought this way was funny.

Right now our taxes funnel to the military and 1% and we pick up the tab for the rest of what we need to get by.
How about imagining a place where our taxes actually help us.