Have you ever lived abroad? Among people who live in another country?
I have, and middle-class Americans, and even working-class ones, have tended to be FAR less informed and interested than their counterparts abroad in anything that’s not right in front of their noses. Their relative interest in and understanding of how societies work, different political systems and histories, economics, and many other topics is generally stunted, parochial, almost infantile. The U.S. is a huge place geographically and in terms of its self-inflated global stature, so that’s one cause (there’s already so much here to care about and be engaged with), but it seems to me that a bigger one is the widespread lack of serious, effective education.
