Or we see the problems in other countries that have such systems and think we can provide better solutions. That's not to say the current system is the best, but that's not what many want either.
I'm pretty sure most Americans don't "see" anything outside the US. Even on Hacker News you see the phenomenon where people tend to dismiss solutions popular and proven to work everywhere else as somehow hypothetical and untested, or at least immediately confabulate some random knee-jerk reason why "it could never work in the US". American exceptionalism is truly a force to be reckoned with.
I can't find the quote, but I believe it was one of the physicists involved in the Manhattan Project who said that the greatest secret of nuclear weapons is that they were feasible to engineer at all. Just by dropping them, the US let that secret out and ensured that other countries began engineering them.
I feel like American Exceptionalism has just turned into collective denial.
There were many reasons, including the fact that the Nazis weren't nearly Manhattan Project level serious enough about pursuing nuclear weapons, and simply lacked the brainpower that had emigrated en masse before the war.
I would say that those of us in the US who are more or less "coastal elite" types are probably just kind of sophomoric about how things work in Europe. I think a lot of us have a simplified and rosy picture of how European systems work, but if we were pressed on the details, would have to concede our ignorance lol
