Found this article, on the tensions between Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, on the NYTimes today.  Looks like the Swedes have chosen a bad response to the Coronavirus, and while they were able to defend it for a while because of other countries disasters, which they were able to point to with ease, now the problem is coming home to roost.  Swedes are looking around and seeing themselves ridiculed by other Europeans (hey Swedes!  Welcome to our world, in the US), and actually shut out of other places.  This is, to say the least, an unusual experience for a country that has rarely had any invitation from the rest of the world to think ill of itself.

It reminds me of other pieces, discussing other countries.  There was an interesting piece in the NYTimes, like this one about France and Germany, exploring the quiet but persistent questioning in France of why they had "done" so badly in the virus while the Germans had "done" so well.  (I think there may have been some luck involved, tbh.)  In general, in Europe there's a lot of still-quiet questioning of themselves, though it competes, as ever, with a spectatorial smugness about the clown-car-in-flames that is the United States.

I expect this self-critique will come more to the fore.  I also expect it to be avoided as much as possible.  A culture of self-critique is hard to manage, and maybe even impossible to endure more than occasionally.  Certainly that is true of the US; I suspect it is true of other places as well.  What is interesting to me in this moment is how . . . unfamiliar it all seems to the Swedes.  To be a American these days, it seems, means to spend most of your time yelling at other Americans.  Occasionally it may mean hearing others tut-tut about you too.  It certainly requires, though we do it much too little, a cold-eyed attention to various empirical evidences and arguments about how screwed up a country we are.

Reading about these difficulties in Europe is good for Americans, because it reminds us that everyone has a hard time hearing about one's own mistakes, and everyone can do better.  Perhaps political psychology is easier understood if manifested in people disquietingly proximate to us, rather than immediately by ourselves.