No, the problem for many American conservatives is that they have little to no experience with other political systems or organizations than their own. This makes it hard for them to put their own system in context.

To fully understand your own system, you need to also understand other system to be capable of comparisons.

What many Americans fail to realize is that America is an open book for the rest of the world. Due to your language and the dominance of your pop culture we are so exposed to American culture and political and economic system that often we may know it better than our neighbor country.

Americans in contrast are closed of to the rest of the world. Ironically I frequently get various conservative Americans trying to lecture me on how Scandinavia works. But they really don’t know anything. They don’t read Scandinavian literature, watch Scandinavian movies, read Scandinavian newspapers or interact with Scandinavian online in their native language.

What they see is a thin sliver of Scandinavia often filtered by propaganda outlets like FOX news with their own specific right wing agenda.

This applies to most of the world. The rest of the world is mostly invisible to Americans, America isn’t invisible to the rest of us. We see it from a multitude of angles.

The benefit of being from a small country is that it gives you perspective. Being insular is not an option. You need to learn about other cultures and languages, because others will not learn your culture or language. It is too small. Hence you learn to understand others because you must.

Americans never have to understand others. The world revolves around them and hence they tend to be ignorant of how the rest of the world works.

This manifest itself in an inability to see how anything could work different in the US, because that is all they know.

Those of us from small countries don’t face this mental barrier. We are used to seeing societies operating in very different principles from our own.