That ' s the thing , though . A few dudes scream that America is the best , and a couple people yelled along with them because they were feeling patriotic and it ' s easy to get swept up in a crowd . Now we ' ve got a reputation for that , so the people that don ' t think it ' s some kind of paradise don ' t hear Your home isn ' t perfect . They know it ' s not perfect , they don ' t think many people disagree . So the criticism isn ' t trying to argue the US is just okay . They ' re arguing it ' s a shithole . Combine that with all of the haha dumb Americans shit , especially with the craziness that American students go through getting an undergrad , and it ' s something few can resist joining a brawl on . How would you like to spend the price of a small house on getting an education to have half the world tell you it doesn ' t matter and that you ' re stupid anyways ? It feels shitty . Sure , other countries have stereotypes . The difference , though , is that few of them are slippery in the way being dumb is . You can be New Zealand and say , Yeah , I don ' t fuck sheep . I know that . It ' s an objective fact . We can diagnose alcoholism and the like , but there ' s no real good measure of intelligence because nobody can figure out what the hell that means . You could argue that Americans are dumb because of our poor standardized test scores , but that could be blamed of the country ' s lack of focus on standardized tests until recently . Relative to other countries , teaching for the test wasn ' t really a thing . Average Joe who plans on being a mechanic when he graduates doesn ' t really think he has any reason to get too in to the intricacies of English literature . All of the sudden we realized , oh crap , we look stupid . There was a scramble to ready everybody for standardized tests and a recession , then we ended up with a temporarily broken education system . The point is that there ' s a lot of ways to define smart , and lots of causes other than this Being born inside an American border makes you dumb voodoo shit . So yeah , you get the people who think Jesus would bleed red , white , and blue mixed in with normal people who feel like their home is being called shitty while having their intelligence personally insulted after dealing with a shitshow to get an education . Most people are in the second group , I think .