I think the overwhelming majority of people are realizing a lot of the rhetoric is just cynical lies at this point.
Consider the recent report [1] that only 25% of people don't think the media is deliberately misleading them - 50% think they are, 25% are undecided. The implications of that cannot be overstated, especially as the media has increasingly become little more than a proxy for the official position of the day.
The real problem is there isn't any better country. Zero countries currently compete with America for greater freedom.
Please let me know if you know of any because I'm getting absolutely tired of working four months for free each year, knowing that my tax dollars are paying for goods and services from which I'll never be able to benefit.
Modern governance is the problem. However, if there is no country that's, say 50% free (to put an arbitrary number on it), and even when we presume that America is 49% free and "everyone else" is less, that doesn't mean there is actual freedom.
American freedom seems to largely be centered around the ability to make money, the way things are going nowadays. We were more free in the 70s and 80s. Nowadays people in some areas get child services called because they dared to allow their child to venture somewhere by themselves. America is often the worst offender in some of these areas. True patriotism is understanding that we're not the "best" country in the world, and that we could stand a lot of weeding out chaff. Taxes go to a lot more waste than would ever come out of individual benefits, when you take the end result benefit to society. "Freedom" to allow poverty to exist is "freedom for some, but not for all".
It depends what you value most. If you don't mind corruption, then in a lot of developing countries like SE Asia, you can have a huge amount of personal freedom by paying the (relatively cheap) occasional bribe.
If you're morally opposed to that, I'd recommend Singapore for its financial freedoms. After working there for a year, I was initially opposed to such an authoritarian government, but they're one of the rare ones who use their power to run their country very efficiently and keep out of the way of private enterprise.
The thing that always gets me is the freedom of speech issue. I know I'd be jailed in countries like the UK pretty quickly.
I don't know how I'd fair in SE Asia, South Africa, or South America, but my hunch is that it wouldn't be great unless they had similar free speech absolutism.
Is it important to you that your speech is tied to your physical identity?
Now that most communication takes place online, it seems the obvious solution is to say anything controversial via pseudonyms. As long as you don't get careless about protecting your true identity, that seems like something you can do just about anywhere.
