Funny how the yellow bit never, ever reaches 50%. Funny how 74% think the US is the best country in the world ("along with others"). During Trump2.0. And by funny I mean sad.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Don't Germans get taught about American exceptionalism in schools or something like that? That's so cool from an academic POV.
Tbf The american public has been bombarded with propaganda since birth but still thinks it's free. Very bad education, and lot's of entertainment and fast food.
The american public has been bombarded with propaganda since birth
This is so pronounced and obvious when speaking with Americans of any political stripe online (and offline) and it's so grating
As an American who has been against the "pledge of allegiance" since I understood what "pledge" and "allegiance" meant. It's hard to convince people around me how much propaganda we are subjected to daily. How we indoctrinate our children. Like, I have spent hours trying to convince people how insidious the "pledge of allegiance" is. And they just think it's good to follow your country.
I feel for Americans like you :(. It's crazy how effective it is, like you'll see people lamenting about the US political situation and Trump ruling like a dictator and then in the same breath claim the US is still the most free and greatest country in the world. The propaganda seems so deeply ingrained it's honestly impressive
I cringe when I see our flag everywhere and I can't stand the national anthem at every sports event.
I don't want to be proud of my country because I was born here. I WANT to be proud of it because of how good of a place it is to live. I want to be proud of a place that takes care of my neighbors. Provides us with enough food, healthcare, and housing. I want to be proud of a place where knowledge is invested in and the population is educated. Where people can make art and music because their needs are met.
But where I live is stress inducing.
My neighbors are being rounded up and deported.
People are going hungry and SNAP benefits are being restored after being used for political leverage. Where we throw out more food on a daily basis than it would take to feed everyone for a month. Where too many people rely on food banks.
Where healthcare is tied to employment. Where even after paying in for years, some profit seeking corporation can override what my highly educated, licensed doctor says is "medically necessary." Where after years of payment, I can just lose the ability to pay for healthcare. Where being sick is used as a reason to prevent people from being able to get healthcare.
Where homelessness is increasing and we have more vacant houses than we have homeless. Where corporations have the ability to buy up every house and artificially keep people paying them rent until they die.
Where there is a ware against people having access to books. Where the government wants to decrease the standards for education. Where a large portion of the populace want religious texts being the basis for teaching than science. Where our higher education institutions are being blackmailed by the presidents and his regime. Where teachers can't make a living and still are expected to spend their own salary on school supplies for their classrooms.
Where people seem to believe that art and music are only worthwhile if you can make money off them. Otherwise artists need to "get a job" to pay for food, healthcare, and housing.
Where liberalism is taking hold and regulations are being rolled back that protected the citizens from being taken advantage by corporations. All in some bizarre lie that "you too can be an entrepreneur and these regulations are somehow depriving you of your freedoms."
Very bad education
For generations.
That's because there's two kinds of freedom: negative and positive freedom.
Negative freedom is the "freedom from". It's the "I can do what I want and face no consequences, nobody tells me what to do" type of freedom. A man starving alone in the desert has perfect negative freedom. Nobody tells him where to die.
Positive freedom is the "freedom to". It's the "Thanks to society and corporation I can do things that would have been impossible to kings just 150 years ago" type of freedom.
These two types of freedom often contradict and often to increase positive freedoms, negatice freedoms need to be sacrificed.
The highway code is a good example of that. Thanks to the highway system, you can drive whenever, whereever you want to, at speeds that were straight-up impossible 150 years ago. No king of that era could travel as fast and without relying on anyone else as an ordinary citizen can today.
The only reason we can do so though is because there's a huge list of laws that govern in detail what you cannot do on the road. I can safely travel down the highway at high speed because I am not allowed to do so on the wrong side of the road.
Now remember which type of freedom right-wing politicians invoke over and over again and which one they want to sacrifice for it.
Where did you learn about this negative and positive freedom? This is very interesting to me and I'd like to read more on the topic. Thanks in advance.
Others have linked Wikipedia, but Stanford has a great repo of philosophical thought that you can read. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
If you can read German, the Wiki page summarizes everything quite well: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_und_positive_Freiheit
If not, maybe an autotranslation might be good enough.
Sad indeed. The propaganda machine is strong
Funny how marginalized groups don't have that high of an opinion of the United States.
That's not really the impression I get from these data. Hispanics and blacks only seem slightly less enthusiastic than the whites.
If anything it's the women. Who are on a fast track back to being just as marginalized as at the turn of the century - the 20th century.
True. And had there been a separate category for young women they would probably have scored a lot higher.
Proof that the vast majority of Americans are seriously delusional. Or at least exist in a propaganda bubble (which I guess is kinda the same thing).
But mostly rich, old, conservative republican men. As expected.
As near as I can tell from social media, many devout MAGAts are far from rich. Old and conservative yes, but always voting against their own best interests.
Very much disagree.
You are free to disagree, but how about you take a look at the data presented in the graph and tell me which group in each category is the most delusional?
You will find that it's exactly what I said.
There's hardly a difference in income. <$50k is argueably more infatuated with the US than >$100k.
Do you believe the value would go down or up if there were more income bands in the graph?
100k - 500k
500k - 5 million
And so on.
I believe it would go up, because that's the trend established by the existing three band values.
That was not the original premise of your statement and the graph doesn't say anything about that at all. Answering the new question using the data in the graph is pure conjecture.
For reference, here's what you said in your last comments:
But mostly rich, old, conservative republican men. As expected.
and
but how about you take a look at the data presented in the graph and tell me which group in each category is the most delusional?
What you are doing here is a motte-and-bailey argument. You first post your provocative, sexy statement ("rich, old, conservative" and "it's ), but when met with pushback, you switched to an easier-to-defend argument, without acknowledging that you switched your argument. The goal of this is that hopefully your discussion partners don't realize, and now they have to argue against something that's much harder to argue about.
What? I simply picked the highest group from every category. It's really simple. I don't know what you are talking about.
I didn't switch any arguments. Are you trying to gaslight me?
You were the one misreading my statement and trying to start an argument using non-existant data.
<$50k is argueably more infatuated with the US than >$100k.
I don't know where you pulled that info from, but it's not in the graph.
And since you started using non-existent data, I pointed out to you that simply using extrapolation, there is a trend. And that trend contradicts your opinion based on non-existent data.
I simply picked the highest group from every category.
You're comparing percentages, not actual numbers. A higher percentage of high earners said the US was on top but there are a lot more people who fall into the <$50k category than who fall into the >$100k one.
Using the Social Security numbers from 2023 (the latest available) there are 98,168,780 who earned less than $50,000 that year.
28% of those said the US is the best. That's 27, 487,258 people.
Now we need to do some math to find earners over $100,000 but it works out to 25,227,310.
29% of those said the US is the best. That's 7,315,919 people.
27.5 million people vs 7.3 million. There are 4 times as many poor people who believe the US is the best country in the world as there are top earners.
Check out the difference between the group of blue vs yellow: <$50k has 4% more people who think US is the best vs people who think that other countries are better.
$100k has 1% more people who think that the US is the best place vs the opposite.
That means, in total, the group of <$50k is more pro-US-superiority than the group of $100k.
That is data from the chart, nothing else.
pointed out to you that simply using extrapolation, there is a trend
Where is there a trend? There is no trend of the pro US side, there is a trend on the anti US side. And that trend on the anti US side is the opposite of what you are saying.
Three data points is by far too little to extrapolate anything at all.
So I was talking about the people who think that the USA is the best country in the world (the delusional ones). And you started talking about people who think that the USA is either better or just as good (so you included non-delusional people as well).
Great way to massage the data to make it work for you.
My first statement still stands truthful and correct:
The majority of delusional people are rich, old, conservative republican men.
I remember 20 years ago an adult friend of mine (I'm getting old) told me "you can only start a business in the US", and that's why she wanted to stay here. Showing her businesses based from elsewhere was not persuasive.
People believe weird things about the US.
A year and some time ago, I knew of an Argentinian guy who was so psyched about moving to the US. He had been waiting years here in Mexico to get his papers in order so he could migrate up to the US. It was literally the last week before he packed, so he started getting excited and half-started to brag.
I told him I had lived there for many years and that it wasn't what it's cracked up to be. There are many political issues to be aware of that he wouldn't be able to understand yet, but that would surface once he's there.
He got so pissed. He started telling me that only people who immigrated illegally would have those problems. That he had family there and they were all doing fine, and that I was being ridiculous. Like, alright, dude, my bad for giving unsolicited advice. Best of luck with ICE.
- The US is one of the greatest countries in the world, along with some others
- There are other countries better than the US
Isn't the second statement implied by the first?
- Shaquille O'neil is one of the tallest people in the world, along with some others
- There are other people taller than Shaquille O'neil
The way I see the three options:
USA > others
USA = others
USA < others
That is not what the text says. It's giving
- poor
- fair
- good
- better
- amazing
Is this recent? Didn't see a date. Also, it would be interesting to see the upper income level higher, 100k in a major city isn't what it used to be.
Further confirming that Republicans/conservatives are living in their own delusional version of the world.
More like "Americans are living in their own delusional world".
It would be interesting to analyze those numbers by "has never left the north american continent" and "has experienced countries on other continents".
Eh, I disagree. I'm an American that has never had the resources to visit another country. I know many people like me that would agree with what I'm about to say. My lack of physical travel is maybe a small roadblock to understanding how other places operate, but we still live in an age of absurdly high access to information.
The issue isn't that Americans aren't traveling and experiencing other places to learn about alternative ways of thinking and governance. The issue is that many Americans (conservatives being overrepresented) have no drive to question American exceptionalist propaganda or their own worldviews. The information is there, but it doesn't do any good if a person intentionally avoids learning it.
That comes on top. But believe me, whatever you see of another country online is nothing in comparison to experiencing it live.
So basically the majority seems reasonable on paper, so why Usa end up with such a government every single time (albeit with better or worse puppet masters)
Because under the current system the major parties pick candidates based on 'first past the post' primaries. This means that the small percent of the population that votes in primaries has an outsized effect on the outcome. In areas the GOP controls, the usual winning candidate is the most extreme Right winger, because the older folks who vote in every election tend to be more conservative.
Similarly, in Dem areas, the older folks tend to vote more, but they'll pick a bland middle of the roader who they think will be 'safe.'
Any Dem Presidential candidate since 1960 could swap programs with Jimmy Carter, while the GOP has gone from 'peace candidate' Richard Nixon to Donald Trump.
The solution is to get more young people involved in the primaries, but the problem is that young people today have less time and money to devote to politics. In 1960, someone could live well with just one part time job; today it take three incomes to keep two people comfortable.
Oh yeah, I remember being asked about this! /s
They didn't ask me, and I'm guessing they didn't ask you, either. So, who DID they ask? Was it random, or was it "random"? Was it readers of a particular magazine or website, or consumers of a particular product?
I'm assuming you know how surveys work? If you're genuinely interested in their data sampling methodology, you can easily find it on the website of the company that conducted the survey (who are named on the infographic).
I'm not making any big claims about YouGov and their reliability or freedom from bias, but this isn't just some random unsourced poll, so props to whoever made the infographic for bothering to include a source.
Yeah, I know how surveys work. They ask a few people and make it sound like they asked everyone. I understand there's a science to it, but if everyone wasn't asked, it's a guess at best.
Let me put it another way: my opinion didn't count enough to ask me. Yours didn't either. So how do they decide who isn't worth asking, and how would the data change if they did ask those people?
A survey or poll is different from a vote. You're right that unless we ask every single person in a group we don't know precisely how that entire group would answer. But this irrelevant, being able to establish patterns in smaller sample groups and extended them to larger population is one of the the cornerstone of science and knowledge.
An engineer needs to know how much weight a specific size and shape of lumber can safely take. They can't test the indvidual beam to breaking point and still use it. So they test other similar sized pieces of wood, under similar conditions, and generalise. This can be done well, or done poorly, depending on how well they can isolate confounding effects.
So with a survey, if I just ask 100 people I know, it's would be a decent survey of the beliefs of my social circle, but it would be a poor survey of national beliefs, because my friends are not a balanced representative sample of the wider population. That's why most polling / surveying uses methods to try and achieve a sample that is actually representative. When done well, these ensure the survey respondents correspond to the demographics of a population (gender, education, religion, location, health, etc).
Obviously this approach has its limitations, and can be done poorly, but there's a bunch of research and evidence for what methods help achieve more accurate results. Saying "this poll can't be accurate because they didn't ask me" is like saying "I don't know if the sun will rise tomorrow". You're right, we won't know for sure until we actually see it rise, but we can infer from past events and confidently predict the likely outcome.
If you want to say "this survey isn't accurate because it uses an older demographic model that has been shown to be ineffective at representing contemporary attitudal choices" or "this survey is inaccurate because it only controls for age, race and gender, but didn't account for patterns of social media usage which are highly relevant" that's fine, that's engaging with the methodology. But if the problem is "they didn't ask everyone so it's wrong" it really seems like you don't know how surveys works.