How they see us: Can U.S. democracy be saved?

If this farcical shutdown of the U.S. government were happening in any other country, we’d call it a failed state.

If this farcical shutdown of the U.S. government were happening in any other country, we’d call it a failed state, said The Express Tribune (Pakistan) in an editorial. Failed statehood, after all, amounts to “a breakdown of governance to the detriment of the populace as a whole”—and isn’t that what we’re seeing in Washington? President Obama dared to pass a law that will raise the U.S. standard of health care up from the “Third World status where it currently sits.” The law was explicitly approved by the highest court and implicitly approved by the voters, who re-elected Obama after a campaign largely about the health-care law. Yet still its opponents balk.

How can this settled issue now cause the world’s greatest economy to flirt with default? said Gabriel Guerra Castellanos inEl Universal (Mexico). In a normal country, it wouldn’t. Yet somehow, one tiny faction of the opposition party has been allowed to dictate whether the U.S. can even pay its government workers. Washington, D.C., is now the seat of “a banana republic.”

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