As Alexis de Tocqueville observed 175 years ago, Americans always think it’s all about them. OK, he didn’t put it exactly that way. But he did say that for all the remarkable qualities of American democracy, it tended to enforce mediocrity and stupidity, and that he knew of no other country with "less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion,” than the United States.
At a moment of obvious domestic and international crisis — much of it invisible to most Americans, or deliberately ignored — that national narcissism or constitutional blindness, which was baked into the American project from its earliest days, is starting to feel like a terminal disease.
