theatlantic:

To Make America Great Again, We Need to Leave the Country

When Americans travel abroad, they are often surprised at how well other countries do the things we used to think America does best. In fact, one reason so many American businesses still lead the world is because they benchmark the competition and emulate best practices. But suggest to an American politician that we should try to learn from other countries, and he will look at you like you are from Mars. It is somehow unpatriotic even to raise such comparisons.

Imagine if a politician were to say, “France has a better health care system than we do.” I can almost guarantee that politician would suffer electoral defeat — even though the statement, in most objective respects, is true. The U.S. is, for too many, the only country that matters; experiences anywhere else are irrelevant. Remember, we have many members of Congress who boast they have no passport.

At a time when many trend lines in the U.S. point to relative decline in this regard, one actually brings hope: More and more young Americans go abroad for some of their education. 

Read more. [Image: jbachman01/Flickr]

I was just thinking on the train yesterday how embarrassing America’s rail system is and how embarrassing we are at frankly a lot of other things, and wondering how the world lets us get away with invading other people’s countries and bossing them around when we are clearly not number one anymore, and thinking about how nothing will ever change because too many Americans can’t help but see Europeans as moral-less commies. 

This article contemplates these things well.