Why is the US so conservative?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't a rather unpleasant far-right party hold 15 seats in the Greek parliament?

A rather unpleasant far-right party (albeit one that also has saner if not necessarily more moderate any more factions) holds 240 seats in our lower house, though.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I also notice that the issues you cite here are the same ones the Democrats have been winning for decades, while the Republicans have been getting their way most of the time on economics. I think living in the rust belt sort of adds blinders a bit because this area of the country is different from the national political situation and becoming more so over time. I think some other poster called Michigan "the state with dying views" and Ohio is very similar. I am not so optimistic as to believe the social conservative cause is doing well in the long term (with the possible exception of abortion).

Oddly, I find myself socially liberal in areas where social liberalism is making gains--gay marriage most notably--and socially more moderate or even somewhat conservative in areas like abortion and (to a lesser extent) guns where large parts of the country are actually more conservative than in, say, the seventies or eighties. The main exception is the environment, an area in which I'm quite leftist (though for similar reasons to why J.R.R. Tolkien can be considered 'leftist' on the environment if you only look at policy positions and not underlying motivations, i.e. a distrust for the industrial on spiritual grounds) but in which I despair of all that much getting done considering the interests arrayed. Drugs are actually an area in which I'm somewhat more conservative than what seems to be the trend of the country.

I sometimes suspect that my social PM score might actually be positive, though only slightly, if not for LGBT issues, which I feel strongly about because of my personal background.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I can see that. In a lot of ways you seem to be sort of my liberal alter-ego: my PM score is about ten points higher on both sets of issues, you say your social score might be positive if it weren’t for one or two issues which somewhat analogous to my economic score, and I think we both agree on far more things that the scores would suggest. The real difference is a handful of specific issues and a ton of framing. The main reason why my economic score is positive is that I want to work within the capitalist system to correct problems and am reluctant to end it. Most of the rest of my economic views are pragmatic rather than principled. I don’t particularly like extravagant things or people who are into extravagant things, but I am worried about what the effects on their workers would be if we did harm the rich financially. I generally support free trade, accepting that on the whole people benefit more than they lose, but still try to buy American stuff if I can. When it comes to unions, I have a good deal of sympathy because my Mom was on strike for a while when I was in high school. But, I also accept that it takes two sides to come to an agreement (and some of the ways unions direct money has no benefit to workers). I don’t necessarily want a ‘big’ or ‘small’ government, but I want an efficient government that provides as much as it can for the money collected without stealing it from the future via absurd borrowing. I accept that given the current situation, we are going to have to raise taxes as part of a solution but also think that raising taxes isn’t really the complete answer to our problems and am not really thrilled with the idea.

That's pretty close to how, pragmatically, I'd go about fixing (or trying to fix) the economy if I was actually in a position to do so. It's a lot easier to take hardline anti-capitalist positions when you grew up in a community that could probably be self-sustaining without much difficulty and where cell phones and wireless Internet don't work more often than they do. I recognize that if I'd grown up in the old Manufacturing Belt, or in some city or suburban area in general, as opposed to in a rural backwater with a harsh climate but fair-to-high crop yields, I'd probably have a much more pragmatic outlook on this. So I guess I'd say my economic score's so far to the left because my ideals tend towards the axiomatic (which is part of my personality in general) and have been relatively unalloyed by my experiences (and since I plan to do communitarian academic and religious work, they'll probably remain so, which is why I admit I would probably never make a very good policymaker in this area).

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The death penalty and immigration I'm pretty far left on for religious reasons, actually. Don't take this the wrong way if I'm incorrect, but I'd hazard a guess that the same (to whatever extent you're to the left on them) is at least partially true for you. And my support for gay issues comes in part from the fact that my generalized disapprobation of overt sexuality applies more or less equally no matter what combination of genders is involved so it seems kind of silly to me to oppose it (though that's not why I care about it; that comes from people I'm close to), which...I don't know, but somehow I doubt that's a conventionally liberal reason to have, ha.

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Oh my God, this sounds exactly like something that could happen to me! In fact, this summer my computer, which is a Vostro 1510 that runs Windows XP that I've had since the summer of 2008, stopped charging the battery and had some dead pixel rows on the screen. I refused a new computer, sent mine in to Dell for a week so they could replace the motherboard, and used an even older computer belonging to my godfather for most of the time that it was away. My cell phone's about as old (I still have my first laptop and my first cell phone; I only got them when I went away to college); it's a flip phone that snaps right back together when I drop it and the back and battery come off (which is often, since my family is congenitally clumsy), and it can call and receive text messages and even has an alarm clock. I really don't understand what else I would want a phone to do.

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So...basically what I'm saying is, yeah. I know that feeling all too well.