I think it's a feature of having a populous and very geographically large country. There's simply too much politics going on for any individual or even bureauc

I think it's a feature of having a populous and very geographically large country. There's simply too much politics going on for any individual or even bureaucratic control to track and keep sane. Most politics in the mass of issues always swilling around doesn't really affect you, being targeting to specific industries or localities, though they have messy long tail effects as they're constantly over-applied. I recall seeing a snippet of the Prime Minister of the UK being asked about a mail box on some particular street corner in London, in an open forum. He knew exactly what was being discussed. Smaller countries have their politicians more tangibly connected to people, as opposed to local representatives being seated thousands of miles away as is the case in the US. People also forget that the US is set up kind of more like the EU, rather than most other countries. It's a federation of independent states, with deference of law to those states, except for those powers specifically granted to the federal government (at least on paper). This is a yet another abstraction level layered on top of politics that many people in other countries don't conceive. So propaganda easily overwhelms people's natural gleaning of what's going on.