Nobody wants to hear this, but I'm going to say it anyway.
Every time someone from Europe gets online to tell Americans how divided and dysfunctional our country is, I can't decide if I should be annoyed or just laugh. I usually end up somewhere in between.
Here's what those people are missing. The United States isn't a country the way France is a country, or Sweden is a country. It's a union of 50 states, each with its own culture, its own laws, its own way of doing things. Texas doesn't feel like Vermont. Florida doesn't feel like Oregon. That's by design. That tension, that diversity, that occasional argument about who does what, that's not a bug. It's the point.
Sound familiar? It should, because that's almost exactly what the European Union is trying to pull off with 27 member nations spread across a continent that was literally at war with itself two or three generations ago.
Europe has 44 countries in it, according to the United Nations. The EU only has 27 members. That means more than a third of the continent couldn't even agree to join in the first place. And one of the countries that did join, the United Kingdom, thought it over and then decided to leave. Brexit was finalized in 2020.
Inside the EU, decisions on foreign policy, taxes, and major agreements require every single member state to agree. Every one. If Hungary doesn't feel like it, nothing happens. And Hungary has used that power more than anyone. There have been 48 recorded vetoes by 15 different member states since 2011 alone. One country can, and regularly does, paralyze the whole operation.
Meanwhile, Americans are supposed to be embarrassed about how divided we are.
Here's the thing about the US model that I think gets missed. It works because it leans into the differences instead of trying to iron them out. Florida's gun laws aren't the same as California's. Texas handles energy differently than New York does. The culture in Louisiana doesn't match what you'll find in Utah, and it doesn't have to. States govern themselves on a whole lot of the stuff that actually affects daily life. The federal government handles the big picture things, defense, currency, trade, and the individual states handle the texture of life.
That's not chaos. That's a feature.
The EU is trying to get 27 countries, speaking over 20 official languages, with completely different histories, economies, and cultures, to reach unanimous decisions. And people wonder why it's slow. Why it's messy. Why there are constant fights about who owes what to whom.
America solved that problem, imperfectly but durably, in 1789. We've been holding a wildly diverse union together for about 250 years now. We had a civil war. Some states have floated the idea of leaving. But the union held. It keeps holding.
The EU has been a project for less than 70 years, and they've already lost a member.
I'm not saying the US is perfect. There are real things that need fixing, and anybody who tells you otherwise isn't paying attention. But the core concept, building a union of diverse, culturally distinct states under a shared framework of individual freedoms and local self-governance, that idea works. It has worked. For a long time.
So the next time somebody from Frankfurt or Amsterdam wants to tell you America is too divided to function, you might remind them that they're still working on a problem we perfected in the 1700s.
