From a non US citizens point of view, getting spied on by the giant uncle Sam or by Xi's China makes less and less difference if the current trends keep on : USA retracting on nationalistic beliefs while China keeps opening up.
I don't see how China is opening up, the situation is even worse than 10 years ago, we used to have an oligarchy of the CCP, now we have a proper dictator instead.
People hoped that China would open up while modernising, so far it has not worked at all.
Of course, I think this is a silly idea. One proof is how the west seems to be closing up - which implies that money and culture is not such a strong force for "opening up". The thing about China that must change is the nature of power, which remains firmly in the hands of the Communist Party, which is independent of the elected leader. As long as they retain real power, China degenerates into a nation ruled by people not a nation ruled by law.
No, the force that makes a nation "open up" is a culture that invites dissenting voices, and speaks up, loudly, when dissent is stifled anywhere, at home or abroad. We can say, at least until recently, that one of our most unique and valuable qualities was this extreme position on dissent, to not just tolerate it, but encourage it. To open up peacefully, the Communist Party must itself open up to dissent, encourage it within itself, and allow a new, opposition party to establish itself.
But I digress.
The alternative is that everyone starves and you get revolutions, but fewer and fewer people are starving in China and thus the government is legitimized.
The same can be said of the US these days. It seems to go backwards for some strange reason.
That's dangerous over the long term. Democracy is more about the will of the population than highly technical rules.
Like the number of voters?
I can't help feeling these complaints wouldn't have been made if the result was different.
I don't like Trump but it seems he did win.
3 million more voters voted for Clinton but Trump won because of the Electoral College.
Gerrymandering is perhaps the most blatant example, but it's mostly a question of feeling the next election will be fair. If things are down to a coin toss of votes then you can feel it might flip next election. But many US elections don't even have someone running for the opposite party.
This sour grapes whining by Clinton supporters is like a baseball team complaining that they lost a baseball game because while they scored fewer runs they had more hits and fewer errors. Except that's not how baseball games are scored, and that's known from the beginning of the game.
(Just to get it out of my way: I did not vote for Trump, and I've never supported the man. I'm just sick of people complaining about losing by the rules of the system they knew was in place when they started.)
But it's the far from the only issue. Gerrymandering, hanging chad, electronic voting machines / hacking, voter rolls, death of the filibuster, etc are all on various groups minds. Individually they don't mean much but the narrative is just as important as the reality.
This has been a concern for Americans since the dawn of the country. Things in the early 20th century were worse than they are now.
The issue is large numbers of both Republicans and Democrats feel their votes don't matter. Further, the last civil war is outside of living memory.
It's a black swan event which can easily catch people off guard. Rules put in place by people in power have ~zero impact on how much people trust the system.
If you live in California or Texas then you pretty much can't vote for President. Your vote doesn't matter.
To prove me wrong, all you have to do is list the large number of rights that have been revoked in the US. You'll need a lot of substantial counter examples for these:
The US is legalizing marijuana and many states are working on lessening the criminalization of drugs broadly.
The US legalized gay marriage. Meanwhile it's still illegal in 85-90% of the world and 2/3 of Europe.
The US prison population has been declining for about eight years and will be cut in half over 20 years at the current rate. The US has very broad bi-partisan support for ending its mass incarceration policies and ending minimum sentencing laws. For one example, the rate of African American female imprisonment has fallen by 50% since 1999.
The US welfare state has expanded considerably over the last 20 years and is now among the most generous. It's at the OECD average in terms of GDP spent on its welfare state. That puts it in an elite class of about the best 18 nations based on its current scoring.
Criticism about NSA spying is entirely legitimate. However, the US is still actively restricting spying & tracking abuses through curtailing the police. The Supreme Court just ruled on a big one in favor of the people, with more favorable rulings plausibly to come. [1] The Bill of Rights is still working. De facto no such restraints exist at all in China.
If all you've got are issues about immigration, that isn't going to go very far when you compare the actual US immigration policies with those of nearly all of the developed world, which overwhelmingly use variations of merit systems to only allow in certain skill classes of people by points. A further group of the developed world isn't open to much immigration at all (that now includes all of Scandinavia).
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/06/22/605007387/supreme-court-rules...
Everyone expects the US to lead.
Maybe this is just the swinging back after a strong push in one direction, and on average we continue on. Or maybe it's a longer-term change of direction. We will see.
Sessions rescinded an Obama-era rule on marijuana enforcement[1].
It's entirely likely that abortion will be outlawed in 20 states within 18 months.
Income and wealth inequality continued to rise during Obama's tenure and last year's tax cut shows no sign of that stopping. One could argue that the inequality is natural in a liberal environment, but one can also argue that the rules are stacked in favor of the wealthy.
Quite a few states are making it harder for people to vote, especially those who have lower incomes or belong to minority groups.
Partisan gerrymandering (by both parties!) subvert the will of the people.
Finally, false attacks on legitimate press as "fake news" and baldfaced lying by government representatives subvert the press's ability to be a watchdog on the government. That said, the press still has its Constitutional freedom, so I don't want to overstate this point.
Regarding prison population which "has been declining for about eight years" and the US's broad support for ending minimum sentencing... that applied under Obama. That does not apply so much under the current Attorney General[2].
I think there is good reason to believe that the US is becoming less liberal (in the liberal democracy sense) since January 2017.
(Also, to be totally clear, I'm not saying it's anything like the dictatorship that has arisen in China today!)
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessi... [2]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/11/15955570/j...
All of the great things you point out stand a chance of being over-turned within the next 6 years.
Marijuana and gay marriage might stick, but prison population has a long, long way to go before it's anywhere near the same ratio as other developed nations and in the meantime the US is looking up children separated forcibly from their parents for the "crime" of being immigrants, (immigrants, just like your own ancestors most likely were).
The US welfare state is not "amongst the most generous". You've just admitted it's at OECD "average". The fact many other countries are absolute shit, doesn't mean the US is "elite" at this: it's at the bottom of the pile of developed nations, pretty much.
The fact healthcare that is free at the point of use is a contentious issue in the United States (but a given in most developed nations), is a pointer in itself to how poor the whole social contract/welfare area is, and how little empathy for misfortune American politics is allowed to have before it is punished by a narrow-minded and selfish electorate.
And on your point on immigration and Scandinavia, I don't think you understand how immigration within the EU works, or been keeping up to date with the Syrian refugee crisis, and Scandinavia's response since the start of the Syrian "civil" war.
And whilst most EU refugee processing centres are not very nice, and do take some time to do some processing (for legitimate anti-terrorism reasons), they at least do not rip children away from their parents, put them in cells described as "cages" and try and justify this as normal behaviour.
My father is American. I spent my childhood in much awe at the potential and its history, even as a young English boy.
But its future is far from certain, and it most definitely is not on a course of further liberalisation - quite the opposite in fact.
Who cares if you can smoke weed though, right?
% of foreign born in Sweden is highest in Scandinavia, 17%. In Finland it is lowest, slighly over 5%.
In the USA the number is roughly 13%.