[msbarnett]

> IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better

From the outside, I think Americans generally over-estimate the degree to which modern America is actually a liberal democracy. The tolerated range of speech seems to in reality run a perilously narrow gamut from "neo-conservative" to "arch-neo-conservative", with anything left of the former routinely subject to exercises of state force to attack and undermine that dissent in practice (declarations of turning the nebulous self-applied label of "Antifascist" into a "terror organization", COINTELPRO, etc, etc), regardless of what freedoms are claimed to be enshrined in the US constitution.

And this is merely its internal opposition to liberal democracy; again, even a cursory glance at modern Latin American history demonstrates that the US happily prefers right-wing dictators to democratically elected leftists, if the latter is at all detrimental to the US government's interests.