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Notes -
I disagree with a lot of this, but I'll say this to try to clarify something about America and it's culture--
You say that the Germans and British came to America at a time when it had a weak central culture and less central government, but that's sort of the defining feature of America even to this day. I think people don't realize that there was never and still isn't really a central culture in America. There were the blue bloods who ran everything from the end of the civil war until FDR, but they were always a minority, just by far the most succesful and powerful one and they more or less don't exist now.
Likewise, American federal government just doesn't reach the levels of power even in its current form as basically any other developed nation. The % of GDP it spends is like half the average, and its actual physical reach in the world is very limited. I remember I had a conversation with a British friend saying that Trump would've won the election in 2020 if he had done a national lock down during Covid. I ignored the comical lack of understanding of the American view of Covid and government overreach, and plainly stated that the federal government didn't have that power and would have no way to enforce it. This sort of basic lack of understanding of American federal power doesn't seem to reach people oversees when they consume American media and it colors everything they think about it.
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