I didn't talk about other countries because I don't have as much direct experience dealing with them. I do think that Americans tend to have a much rigid view

I didn't talk about other countries because I don't have as much direct experience dealing with them. I do think that Americans tend to have a much rigid view about corruption, fair dealing, and law than say Chinese people do. In some situations that rigidity is helpful, and in others I think it's actively harmful. As for your opinion of conservatives: I pretty much agree that their attack on the federal government in particular is motivated by naked self interest, and they are not the ones who can 'fix' the ills of the federal bureaucracy (at least not without enormous amounts of harm along the way). But that doesn't mean that their criticisms should be completely ignored. The best sort of marketing is that one that mixes lies with truth. I think when conservatives assail the federal bureaucracy for being huge, unaccountable, and grossly inefficient, they are largely correct, even if their proposed solutions would probably make things even worse. Unfortunately this has become a political point that those on the left largely don't want to concede because it complicates the argument for expanding health care. > They're just appealing to the common man who hates the rules Actually, the urban poor vote strongly Democratic. It's small business owners who are the target of this rhetoric, and it's because there's a lot of truth there: the cost of regulatory compliance often falls most heavily on small businesses that have just over 10 workers. They are too small to achieve scale and amortize compliance costs over many people. Small businesses and entrepreneurs are definitely people Democrats should support and help, but I have literally never seen anything on the platform that would make their lives easier.