Remember that the world is with us. McTurtle and the degenerate right are mainstream here in the States but to most Europeans, Canadians, or Japanese, they are bizarre freaks, on the same level as Appalachian snake handlers. The same is true of many other aspects of American politics. Forces that have no place in the modern world are powerful here because of certain socio-economic peculiarities, and the profitability of maintaining those peculiarities. These include the fiction of state sovereignty, the politically motivated glorification of ignorance in the guise of populism, the legacy of slavery in the form of the electoral college, and an economic system geared to the exploitation of formerly unlimited resources, including both natural resources and human labor.