Part of the problem is that the US is big enough to provide all kinds of travel opportunities and experience without people ever needing to leave the administration. If more Americans could visit more countries, it wouldn't take a Michael Moore movie to stir things up.

I've met people from the (former) GDR, Hungary and Czechoslovakia who were better off being poor in those countries, under the Soviet cosh, than they would have been being poor in the US. If I was poor and ill, I'd fare better in some remote part of Cuba than in Washington DC.