@theblackpage@mstdn.social @em_swsurrey@mastodonapp.uk Again, I think there’s a matter of at minimum *perceptual* inaccessibility there - just using myself for an example, I was an avid French student as soon as I had a chance to learn any second language - not until fourteen - and my family, rather exceptionally, *had* taken every generation to Europe since the war, reconnecting with longago roots. It was expected I might go along someday on one of the cycling tours. But it also seemed (and later, proved) impossibly expensive, even in a notionally middle class, educated, white collar family of doctors - I later ended up studying in the PRC, but that was a side effect of the recession, sort of a last-ditch gamble of my life savings at holding onto said middle class status. I’ve still never been to Europe or anywhere but China and Taiwan (but can read the papers readily enough in French and Norwegian/ Danish/ Swedish, and stumble along in slowly-improving Spanish: really it’s not for lack of interest or wanting to go.) Over half of the US does have a passport, as of a couple years ago iirc. I do think your perception was at one point very much correct, twenty or thirty years back I would have agreed readily, but it really has shifted since and especially among the young - just look at the enthusiasm with which they signed up for Rednote, and even started dual-language posting in Chinese and English to exchange with peers abroad. What’s better for the people at the top? Isolated, disinformed, monolingual, time-poor and xenophobic citizens - they have been trying to keep it that way, but the era of the internet has shown that interest is irrepressible, even when a passport costs multiple days’ wages at a time many must go without healthcare, and choose between utilities and food. Of course, as of 2025 they also search your social media for regime dissent and may demand you turn over your devices just to pass the borders, on pain of possible detention or worse - so who is now most likely to travel even *from* here? Not likely the people who might dispel that impression. Only about 22% of the US population voted for this regime - certainly those entitled exceptionalist jingoists are here, but they’re no majority. About a quarter of the populace is totally disenfranchised legally, ineligible to vote, and about that number over again are either disengaged (yes, those for whom that is true *are* responsible) out of apathy or misinformation campaigns, or experience direct and indirect disenfranchisement via gerrymandering, mass removals from voter rolls, documentation requirements which cost money or require permanent addresses, fraudulent voter registration assistance (online sites purporting to register voters which do no such thing as no online registration is permitted, period), and voter suppression and intimidation (very real factors I’ve experienced even with my considerable white, educated, abled privilege: living in constituency districts that span eighty miles across two major cities but are only a mile wide, designed to minimize the representation of minorities; no-notice closed polling sites, especially near universities and of-color neighborhoods; no time off work to vote in wage jobs to which one either is present or fired without protections; hourslong waits outdoors with no seating or shelter, even in severe weather; no mailed ballots, unless formally approved as disabled or over 65; no pandemic protections. Also reported in my region: mailers threatening voters in contested districts to vote for a given candidate or “be reported” after the election; police standing by or even escorting aggressors intimidating voters at the polls.) The picture people outside a country are most likely to get - or often even inside it, if they’re believed to be cowed by, belong to, or identify with the hegemon - is always the picture power wants everyone else to see: the one that appears to legitimize their mandate. In this case they didn’t have it to start with, and approval has (as one might expect) only dropped since. As when looking at any purported summary of the beliefs or positions of any large group of people - who is represented in this portrait? Who gets to tell the story, and cui bono?