To fully understand this you'd probably have to live in the US. We grow up constantly hearing things like "in America at least we know we're free" and many of us can't help but think "why do they keep repeating this? Is everyone else not?". We're constantly indoctrinated about being the best in the world, so no matter how bad things are here, they must be worse everywhere else right?
We have an enormous amount of people in the US who've never been outside of it and have a completely wrong picture of the rest of the world. It was shocking for me, for example, when I came over to Europe and saw places like Sweden and France. I saw what I knew as socialism, but it seemed to be working! And the more I looked the more it appeared to actually work better for the average person. It was so demonized back home, who could have imagined that it's actually just a trade off like everything else. Some previously good friends of mine now literally think I'm a communist (sadly I'm not even exaggerating).