Why Does America Choose the World’s Worst Leaders?
How American Politics Descended Into the Tragedy and Farce of Self-Destruction
As you and I watch the grim spectacle of Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, jetting back from a vacation to Cancun, since, well, his failed state is a place going largely without electricity, heating, or water, a question needs to be asked: why do Americans choose such bad leaders?
To the rest of the world, it’s hilarious, tragic, and bizarre in equal measure. Americans don’t live in an authoritarian state…yet. They live in a failing democracy. They still have the power, however weakened, to choose their leaders. Billions of people around the world don’t. And look at who they choose.
Who on earth elects this grab-bag of malicious fools, incompetents, and demagogues? How do you, for example, vote for a man like Ted Cruz? Someone so venal, so corrupt, so flagrantly awful that he rode the coat-tails of white supremacy for political gain by becoming the sycophantic flunky of the very man who abused him, and then jets off to paradise, while his failed state thunders apart into post third-world levels of catastrophe?
What exactly is wrong with Americans, the world wonders. The answer that the world comes up with goes like this. They’re idiots. Nobody else could choose such hilarious, tragically self-destructive buffoons as leaders over and over and over again. In the rest of the world, where such figures come to power, nobody much elects them. They storm in with tanks and militias and men on jeeps with AK-47s. Americans alone choose to be ruled by people who literally couldn’t care less if they or die, and the only possible answer to that is: they’re the world’s biggest idiots.
Yes, there are now contenders to the throne. Britain’s lost its mind in a fever dream of nationalism. But even Brits might draw the line at losing water, power, and electricity. Texans, though, are probably going to vote in Ted Cruz all over again.
And it’s hardly just about Ted, or a problem on the right. It exists on the left, too. Americans desperately need the following things: healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare, income, safety nets, housing. The skyrocketing costs of all those things have…
