Poitics, or lack of same

That's not the right way to look at it. The US lacks an orderly mechanism to get rid of an incompetent administration rapidly.

Donald Trump served out his first term as president, despite his incompetence leading to a lot of extra American deaths from Covid-19, and has a fair chance of getting all the way through his second term despite being older and even sillier now.

Running water depends on local government - it's one of those natural monopolies. The lunatic privatisation freaks would like to turn it into a closely regulated private enterprise - ENRON showed the folly of that approach, but lunatics don't learn from experience.

We have multiple actual opposition parties in Europe covering the entire political spectrum. Sometimes they even get a turn in government.

At least one typically provides the piggy in the middle balancing act and can form a coalition with either of the main parties to make a viable government. They do sometimes get shafted as a result.

What happened in France was that the ultra right and the ultra left ganged up to take out the unpopular centrist Prime Minister who was basically just trying to balance the books with a budget.

Politicians over estimate their own importance. Belgium survived OK for over 650 days without a government - breaking their own previous world record!

Lack of running water is inconvenient, lack of potable water is much more serious. You die of dehydration a lot faster (days) than starvation (weeks).

Beer has the big advantage that in dodgy third world regions it is usually safe to drink even when the water isn't.

Sounds good to me.

Beer is surely an important component of human evolution. I suspect it's related to the grandparent effect.