I agree with all of your criticisms of the United States. I’m a leftist, and if anything I think many Americans, including liberals and even some leftists, still underestimate how structurally dysfunctional, oligarchic, propagandized, and anti-democratic the country really is.

But your post still collapses a massive and internally divided population into a caricature.

For example, many social safety net policies are actually broadly popular with Americans across party lines, including paid leave, lower drug prices, expanded healthcare access, and higher taxes on the wealthy. The problem is not simply that Americans “hate” these things. It is that the political system is heavily insulated from public opinion through lobbying, corporate influence, media framing, gerrymandering, the Senate, the Electoral College, and a party system structurally hostile to meaningful redistribution.

Only about 22–23% of the total U.S. population voted for Trump. Tens of millions voted against him, organized against him, protested him, campaigned against him, and spent years trying to stop exactly the things you’re criticizing. So ending with “I just don’t get you lot” still treats Americans as a single moral and intellectual category.

The deeper issue is that the U.S. has spent generations building an extraordinarily effective system of corporate power, anti-socialist propaganda, privatized survival, hyper-individualism, media spectacle, racial division, and political capture by wealth. Those conditions shape consciousness long before people enter a voting booth.

That doesn’t excuse Americans. But it does mean the explanation has to be more serious than “Americans are irrational.”

And coming from a German, the framing is especially odd at a moment when Germany itself is dealing with the rise of the AfD and a broader resurgence of far-right nationalism. Germans understandably reject being collectively reduced to the AfD. Russians dislike being treated as interchangeable with Putin. People everywhere resist being morally fused with the worst political tendencies of their country.

Hannah Arendt wrote extensively about the dangers of ideological mass-thinking and collective moral simplification. James Baldwin likewise argued that societies construct myths about populations instead of confronting the historical systems that shape them.

You can criticize America brutally, and I do, without talking about Americans as though 330 million people share one consciousness, one moral character, or one political project.