I guess teaching kids is probably a good thing to be good at, though.

I haven’t looked at your source materials, but I’ll venture an hypothesis why some of these things work there and not here.

Common cultural consent.

I happen to think that the worst system imaginable will work if everyone agrees to it, while the best one will fail if there is significant dissent. Trouble is, common consent is philosophically opposed to individual liberty, which is the great myth underpinning America.

America has had periods of common cultural consent. For example WWII (which, ironically, was immediately preceded by an era of cultural dissent comparable to today’s — and to the Vietnam War era) and afterwards into the 60s. These periods have, as far as I have been able to find out, been marked with serious repressions, vigorously supported by the populace whether they themselves enforced them or insisted that the state do so.

Vietnam broke America’s latest “common consent” phase, and it has never been regained. A symptom of this is the Reaganomics phenomenon of “no cross subsidy” — in which the system sanctioned the 30K person refusing to subsidize the 4K person. Naturally, the communal “flower children” of the 1960s mostly subscribed to the “Reagan revolution”, now that they had stock portfolios to guard.

The practical — and the philosophical — withdrawal of support by the well-off to those less so, and the refusal by those less well-off to see such support as an opportunity rather than as an entitlement (or a weapon), represent, I think, our greatest challenge. The War on Terror is a chimera — says the amoeba who has spent much of the last two days shoeless in lines at airports. People do not hate without reason. We are the reason.