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I tend away from nationalistic exceptionalism and inferiorism. I tend to find one nation that seems very well together in one area is often all fouled up somewh

I tend away from nationalistic exceptionalism and inferiorism. I tend to find one nation that seems very well together in one area is often all fouled up somewhere else. But I've just seen so many examples of America's inability to build working beaurocracy lately that I begin to wonder. This of course is a fairly trivial example but others are not. I'm sure I'm consuming cherry-picked media and if I went looking I could find the U.K. government with its pants down over here or Japan up to something silly but I have been wondering of late.

Symbiote 6y ago
The UK seems to have made a mess of their Coronavirus response (fewer cases but even more deaths than the USA). That accounts for most of the current news. Johnson has recently continued the trend of nominating far too many people to the House of Lords (the unelected upper chamber of Parliament), which is a severe weakness in British democracy, second only to the terrible voting system for the Commons (lower house) in my opinion. "Boring" bureaucracy like the headlights is rarely a significant problem. The idea that the government is fundamentally incompetent and shouldn't be trusted even to tie its own shoelaces seems uniquely American -- in Britain, if part of the government isn't working the people look for a politician to blame, usually either for interfering or cutting the budget. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news (centre-left, free to read) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (centre-right, parts behind a paywall)