Bernie Sanders asks -- if Denmark can have universal health care and free tuition for college, why can't the United States? 

I've heard him ask it many times, and hadn't realized until I read this Vox article that there is actually a reason why, and it's not something you can wish away with the kind of sarcastic comebacks that Sanders is famous for.

In order to pull it off these stars have to line up:

1. The Democrats have to control the White House.
2. And have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
3. And a majority in the House.

But even that, as rare as it is, is not enough. The Democrats in the Senate have to all be progressives. For example, when the Affordable Care Act was passed, the 60-vote majority included independent Joe Lieberman who often acted more like a Republican who is owned by the insurance industry. The single-payer option was the big thing his support cost. 

So it's rare in our system that the planets line up in a way to get big things like ObamaCare passed. Even the stimulus was highly contentious, when the Dems had both houses of Congress and the White House. 

And huge changes like the ones proposed by Sanders, no matter how desirable they are, require a super-majority across all branches of government, and they pretty much never happen. The normal thing is a split government. Lately having a split government has meant that almost nothing changes. 

BTW, it's even worse than 1, 2 and 3 -- there's a 4 and 5 as well. The Supreme Court has to be cooperative as we found out with ObamaCare. And as John Bredehoft points out in a comment on Facebook, if the people love the feature, when there is a Republican super-majority, they won't be able to get rid of it because the voters won't let them. We love our benefits (like Social Security, for sure, and almost certainly ObamaCare, so you can forget about repealing it).

You could argue as to whether it was designed this way, but this is the way it is. And European democracies are not like the American form of government, they are parliamentary, which means that when governments form they control everything until there are new elections, when a new government forms that controls everything. So they have been able to get progressive policies like universal health care and free college tuition and lots of other things, because it's possible in their systems where it's virtually impossible in ours.

This isn't something anyone alive today set up. So you can't find someone to blame. It's just the way it is. Everything is a slog, and it requires compromise to get anything done. 

So Bernie's question does not have the answer he wants it to have.