When it comes to a whole basket of issues — abortion, gun rights, mass incarceration, and health care, to name just a few — the US is completely out of step with our Western European allies.

And these are the very same issues that have created such polarization in America itself.

Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Stanford law professor Mugambi Jouet grew up in Paris. As an outsider he looks at America with a unique point of view. He believes that the causes of our political backwardness have been deeply ingrained in the DNA of Americans from the nation’s founding. Among the most significant causes, he argues, are:

•  Anti-intellectualism

•  Anti-government paranoia

•  Racial resentment

•  Christian fundamentalism

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