As an Australian looking in, much that manifests in the USA is simply inexplicable. It feels like the sensation is shared in most other western democracies. (

As an Australian looking in, much that manifests in the USA is simply inexplicable. It feels like the sensation is shared in most other western democracies. (Actually, it's probably even worse for people in Europe, as in Australia we seem to have a stronger pull recently towards 'the American way of doing things', though perhaps I'm just more sensitive to it the last several years.) I suspect the problem with explaining the lack of social justice is in part because, if you're living within that system, and have had no experience living outside it, then alternatives just sound infeasible and fanciful. It's a challenge to just find a bit of ground to start any such conversation. An excellent article by David Bentley Hart published earlier this year included this quote, which did the social media rounds at the time, and conveys the exasperation any informed onlooker experiences. "Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. " From: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism