this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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I'm an American who moved to the Netherlands in July of '22. I spend a lot of time going back and forth. My then fiancé, now my wife, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the pandemic. Given the obvious price difference for medication to treat the disease, I decided to move in with her instead of her coming to the US.
I find it disheartening to see what the rest of the world thinks about Americans up close. I am competently multilingual enough to hold conversations. I have to admit now that I understand why other natively born Americans pretend that they're from Canada outside of the U.S.
Despite my embarrassment about the body politic and discourse from my country, I find that the the same authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-intellectual mind-viruses that permeate through society in the United States (especially in rural communities) have a beachhead here in Western Europe. Either that or they've always been here to begin with. To me, the difference is that the scale is much smaller.
America's worst export.
Yeah, for sure. The Russians have been busy in all countries. The reason things got out of hand in the states is because you have a two party system. You only need to control a few people to control enough to take over the country.
That being said, Americans need to take a page out of the French play book at this point. If you try to make a Frenchman work an extra half hour a week, Paris will burn. That's the level of outrage you need here. Nothing short of that will be effective. Don't protest, riot! A few people hanging about with plakards isn't going to cut it when the government is deciding which TV shows they'll allow, threatening politicians, protecting pedophiles, killing witnesses in federal custody, detaining people without cause, deporting/imprisoning people without trial, and deploying combat troops against peaceful protesters.
I'd like to point out that all this shit is not normal and Americans need to understand how deeply fucked up the situation is. From where I'm standing I'm not sure most of them do. Yeah it's regrettable that fascism took hold in the states despite the rest of the world screaming at them to stop, but what's really alarming is that they're just kinda going along with it.
Too many Americans are eager to lick the boot. "We have to work (for free) this weekend to get this feature out [for the deadline the owner made up and customers don't care about]" was something my old team unironically said to me more than once
As a leftist American, you're right. There's a simply incredible amount of the population who refuse to participate in politics at all, then another huge swathe who gets all their news from social media or a single source which never gives the whole picture. I've protested, I've written my leadership, I've changed family and friends to the side of sanity but it feels like there's just no winning like this. I'm ready for a general strike, to stop paying federal taxes but it's all self harming if done alone. Our leaders have failed us basically across the board and I'm hoping that they've fucked up enough in the eyes of the general public so there's a correction and we can get this country far more socialized and kick corporations off welfare.