>It’s bizarre to point to criticism of the government to justify the failures of the government.
I think that would be a fair statement to make in the global context, but Americans' distrust and paranoia around anything the Government does really is exceptional.
> I think that would be a fair statement to make in the global context, but Americans' distrust and paranoia around anything the Government does really is exceptional.
I'm not sure how accurate that generalisation is. The US has a lot of government – in some ways, a lot more than many other countries do, because local government in the US has a lot of responsibilities which in other countries are centralised at the state/province or even national levels - such as law enforcement, courts and prosecutors, public education, correctional facilities. Much of the US has two layers of local government (county and municipal), some parts even have three layers (e.g. the state of New York has village governments underneath town governments underneath county governments), when many other countries only have a single layer. The US has lots of special-purpose local governments (school districts, drainage districts, emergency services districts, etc), where in many other countries those kind of functions would be performed by state/provincial/national agencies instead.
Most of the anti-government rhetoric in the US is primarily directed at the federal government, not state or local governments. Even when state or local governments are targeted, it tends to be only directed at some of them. Some American conservatives will be very critical of the state governments of California or New York, but I doubt they'd be anywhere near as negative about the state governments of Florida or Texas or Utah or South Dakota. Or very critical of the county/city governments of big liberal-leaning urban areas like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, but far less likely to criticise the local government of some rural "Red State" county or town.
Despite its reputation for hyper-capitalism, the US is arguably "behind" much of the rest of the English-speaking world when it comes to asset privatisation, public-private partnerships, public funding of private schools (US % of K-12 students in private schools is significantly below the OECD average, and severely limited public funding for private schools is likely a big factor in that), etc – and those issues are far from being the top priority for contemporary American conservatism. Which suggest that the US is actually far less "anti-government" than its popular image suggests.
War on drugs, 20yr of military involvement in the middle east, meddling in Latin America, three letter agencies manufacturing domestic terrorism of all types and the list goes on...
I think that would be a fair statement to make in the global context, but Americans' distrust and paranoia around anything the Government does really is exceptional.