Honestly, America just seems in a death spiral across so many different factors, and the only solution to basically any of them is having faith in government, but the government has repeatedly failed them so many times that people don’t.

Like lack of fixing lead and pollution problems creates dumber people, less able to hold their government to account.

Lack of strong public education makes people think that governments can’t run schools, so they pull their kids and money into private schools which makes public schools worse. It also makes people dumber and less able to hold their government to account.

Lack of public healthcare means that people don’t understand that the government can really effectively and efficiently run a utility that helps them at the lowest points of their lives.

Like, American GDP per capita, is ~$90,000, Canada’s is roughly ~$55,000. We should not be able to provide comparable government services, and yet every time I went down to the states I’d notice notably worse infrastructure, on top of all the services and safety nets that I knew they weren’t getting.