Talk Elections

There is no denying that compared to almost every other developed country the US is  very conservative, in what other country could Michelle Bachmann be a serious contender for the presidential nominee. In almost every other developed country opposing universal health care would make you an extreme right winger, but supporting it in the US makes you a socialist/communist/marxist. Why is this?

I would argue she isn't a very serious candidate here, she has a very small chance of being the GOP nominee and basically zero chance of beating Obama.Just because someone calls you that doesn't make it true.  Asshats say a lot of stupid sh**t.  You support the war in Iraq you're suddenly a Neo-Con.  Support drug legalization, you're a hippie stoner.  Don't like Israel, you're an anti-Semite.Different strokes for different fokes?  And it's not like we are more conservative about everything.  Our gun laws are much more liberal than yours.  But give it time, once the baby boomers die off we will be less conservative.

'Liberal' gun laws is a conservative position.

Guns are heavily restricted in most of the rest of the world. And rightly so.

I have sometimes wondered how much of it is simply the political system.  If the USA was a parliamentary democracy, in which it was actually straightforward for a party that wins a national election to actually pass some of its agenda, then universal health insurance probably would have passed some time in the 1960s or 70s, and it'd probably be uncontroversial today.  The American political system has so many veto points, that doing something big becomes very difficult.

And of course, the US has open primaries, with many (most?) members of Congress having to worry more about a primary challenge from their party's base than they do about being defeated by someone from another party.  That tends to lead to a very different cast of characters getting elected from what you would get in a "normal" democracy.

It is a country of bitter, deluded, spiteful, anhedonic madmen, bore.

 Bachmann is leading the national primary poll, so she certainly a contender for the nomination, I doubt she'll win as well, but the fact that someone as extreme as Bachmann is a contender for the nomination of one of the two main parties says something. Also I know that someone calling you a communist for supporting universal health care doesn't make it true, but the fact that many americans believe that its an extreme viewpoint whereas in other countries not supporting it is out from the mainstream definately shows a gulf between the US and other developed countries.

Lack of class solidarity as a result of the black (and later immigrant) underclass.

The Canadian labor movement has always been rather weak politically, and Canada's turned out fine.

It's a country founded on what you may call conservative ideas. I'm guessing that's really much of the explanation.

I also think it has something to do with how US society was created and even more with how Americans have idealized that process.

That alone wouldn't neccesarily mean that's there's less cohesion among classes in Canada.

^^
This.

I think it is more corporatist than anything.

There is nothing conservative about the size of our budget.

Over the past decade, we have also seen a huge rise in laws that restrict civil liberties. Conservative would mean not adding these laws, since conservative means status quo.

What really befuddles me isn't so much the fiscal conservatism of the US, it's the saliency of social/cultural matters and the continuous struggle over them.

Here in Greece, arguably the most socially conservative of European western democracies, abortion was legalized thirty years ago with little fuss, after being accepted practice for much longer, and nobody has ever talked about it again.
Gay people were never targeted for ridicule and condemnation by our (powerful) Orthodox church and its conservative political allies.
And while anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise due to our economic hardships, there is nowhere near the venom and hate of people like Tom Tancredo and Steve King.  

Part of it - perhaps waning now - is that our ethnic diversity deflects to some extent what would otherwise be perhaps more class based voting. (I notice now that Lief mentioned this above.) And of course for a developed nation, the US is off the charts when it comes to to the percentage of its population for which matters of faith are an important aspect of their lives.  On the regression analysis line, most of the nations are dots that are not far from the line created by per capita income on one axis and religious intensity on the other, while the US is up in the corner of the chart just miles and miles away from the line.

Anyway, that is my theory. Some might think it has more to do with the indulgence of the fantasy of American exceptionalism, but I don't really subscribe to that one myself.

Ever heard of Le Pen, Bossi, Haider, Kjaersgaard, etc, etc?

Immigration and racism is one subject where Europe can't really claim to be much better than the US. If we had anything like the US-Mexican border I think racism would be a lot worse than it already is...

If one were to over-generalize in a ridiculous fashion one could say that anyone in Europe who cared about religio nwas born again in the nineteenth century and had to flee to the US. Ergo...

As I alluded to above I think perceptions of class are very different in the US - at least partly for good reason.

Yeah, thanks about the condescension.

We have the equivalent of the Mexican-American border: it's called the Aegean. And yet until the last couple of years, incidents of xenophobia were very few and far between here. So perhaps it's time for you to stop the overgeneralizations.

The South, Midwest, and mountain states are the  conservative parts of the union and have the most influence over our political system. Even with more people living on the coasts and cities such as New York City, there not much influence coming out of there. Most people in the South ridicule New York natives for hating religion, baby killing, gay loving, elitist liberals. The same thing happens in the Northeast with stereotyping southern as gun totting, NASCAR/football loving, religious rednecks. The double standard goes to both sides of the issues. In the future, I see conservatives to start becoming more as libertarians with social conservativeism to be dead as winnable political issues. The libs will become more social democracy and will move forward from there agenda on.

It isn't. Not even close.

What is the US?
Economically? Corporatist
Socially? Libertine

I'm not really sure what conservative economics would be. I guess if you want to argue that corporatism is conservative you could claim we are economically conservative as corporatism has been around long enough that conserving the economic system of the past is basically conserving corporatism.

Socially we are not even remotely conservative. Yes there are some people who practice social conservatives. And there may be some laws left around that have some social conservatism. But society as a whole is definitely not. Is virtue promoted at all? Is purity and innocence? Society uses sex to sell, values promiscuity, adultery, abortion, the degradation of women as a whole. It values basically every vice imaginable while belittling any virtue.

I'm talking about lifestyle and practices, not laws. The laws are irrelevant since they don't change someone's inner thoughts and values. If you want to live any kind of wholesome life, you have to pretty much tune out of the culture of modern society as a whole.

We really have the worst of all worlds. We still have various authoritarian laws, combined with a libertine culture and corporatist economy. I think our society is a pretty massive failure in this regard. But I have been looking around and I don't see any other society that doesn't fail in the same way.

But in the end, I guess it depends on what you view conservatism to be in general. Since I separate the law from the culture, I don't see it. Since I think of corporatism as non-conservative, I don't see it.

This, basically.


Same, but for much different reasons. Unlike Europeans, I think the problem is not that America is too right-wing, but that Europe is too left-wing.

You have to be careful about going too far down this particular road (there is, for example a very old radical democratic - for want of a better term - tradition in the U.S, and it's not a co-incidence or an 'accident' that Syndicalism was as strong in the mining camps of the American West as it was anywhere else in the world. You then have the American Jewish Marxist tradition and so on. More recently various forms of 'Alternative' politics (especially with a small p) have been stronger in certain parts of the U.S than in most other places. And, hey, even some powerful Democratic politicians in the fast-receding past were relatively radical in their own way) but there's obviously a degree of truth to the question/observation, especially as far as formal politics is concerned. So acknowledging the dangers of making sweeping statements, I'd offer the following factors:

1. A unique political system which is geared towards protecting established interests to a degree that is occasionally quite remarkable. This includes the structure of government itself (everything from the particular division of political power and the operation of Congress to the weakness of local government in most of the country; the latter is important because it prevented/prevents the development of radical bridgeheads like Poplar, County Durham or the Rhondda), but also the structure of the two political parties, which, as I keep going on and on about, aren't really political parties in a conventional sense.

2. An extremely conservative political discourse, with roots in America's only slightly odd take on liberalism. Now that liberalism is dead as a political project* (we're now quite close to the 100th anniversary of that, by the way) all political discourses that are rooted in it will inevitably be highly conservative in practice because alternatives to the language of individual rights will not be tolerated. The worship of the Constitution and so on is a big part of this.

3. America's unique social structure and perceptions of class. Which, in turn, is linked into a whole host of other factors; the legacy of slavery, centuries of mass immigration from a huge range of other countries (and the way that different groups of immigrants turned - and turn - to different types of work), the extraordinary power of American employers over their workers (including their willingness to turn to violence; interesting that this was also true of France, another country with politics that can take a while to explain satisfactorily), and the fact that, almost uniquely, capitalism actually delivered (note past tense) for most working class Americans more-or-less on its own. Always several generations down the line, mind, but that may actually have encouraged conservative sentiment.

Plenty of other things as well, I suppose. And all that I've written can be neatly filed under 'gross generalisation'. I've just realised that I used the word 'unique' a lot. I must stress that this isn't because I believe in American Exceptionalism (or any such other nonsense), but because I tend to think that everywhere is unique, even if there are always similarities with other places. It's the similarities that are usually the interesting things.

One final thing though. It's interesting to note that many of the great centres of American radical sentiment are now noted for their conservatism; Northern Louisiana for example. I mean, there you have an area that gave remarkably strong support for the Socialist Party of America and later (and this time overwhelmingly) for Huey Long, but which by the 1990s was the great stronghold of, well, David Duke.

*If not in other respects.

No need to be so testy. I wasn't implying that you didn't know that those people existed, I was pointing at them as examples of a pattern.

There is a vast difference between a sea border and a land border. I doubt the share of (Turks, Egyptians?) is the same in Greece as the share of Hispanics in New Mexico or Arizona, but I could be wrong.

Regardless, that might mean that Greece is great when it comes to immigration issues (I'll confess that I'm no expert on that subject) but the general pattern in Europe is certainly not one of tolerance. Especially if we include Eastern Europe in the analysis.

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

We don't have true left-wing party that is huge. The Dems are center-right-left and not left wing.

If the size of government isn't liberal or conservative, then what is it?

I know many of you think it is one or the other. I disagree.

It certainly isn't something moderate either. That budget is not moderate.

But the US were far less conservative until the 1980s (or even the 1990s). While that's true to some extent for most of developed countries, in USA this shift has taken epic proportions.

The 1990's were pretty conservative if you think about it.

'Liberal' gun laws is a conservative position.

Guns are heavily restricted in most of the rest of the world. And wrongfully so.

Says a guy who lives in the country with the highest number of gun related deaths per capita among developed countries.

That really depends on how you define conservative. Certain extremely stupid left-winged policies have been removed and certain, rather disgusting, leftist ideological positions have been largely abandoned.

Overall, I'm not convinced you can say that the world is epically more conservative today than it was 30 years ago.

Perhaps I should clarify that I think the different roots I'm referring to might have taken effect rather late, like now.

Why should guns be unrestricted?

The argument shouldn't be why something should be allowed, it should be why it shouldn't be. The default position should be that freedom reigns unless there is a compelling reason not to allow it.

I'd prefer guns not existing, but I don't trust the cop to have one any more than a random thug. Yet if you make them outlawed, it is the cop and random thug that still have them, and not the law abiding citizen. Sure, you'll decrease gun violence as random rage acts and accidents with guns would decline. But I like to at least have the option to have one if I want while cops and other thugs can have them.

I absolutely disagree that everything should be legal first, I think in the extreme opposite direction.  Things shouldn't be legal unless we fully understand the repercussions of that on society.  That's the basis of so many problems in the US, we wait until it becomes a problem to act.  How about we just relax for a second instead of acting like 3-year-olds saying "gimme, gimme, I want it NOW".  The same goes for economics, not just social things.

And so your argument is that it's too late and we should just all have guns since some bad guys already do?  How about we take measures to make sure no more bad guys get guns instead of making it infinitely easier.  Don't you think moving in the direction of no guns makes more sense than exacerbating the issue by making more guns available?  I agree you should have the option to have one as a law-abiding, peaceful citizen.  But you do not under any circumstances need assault weapons or multiple weapons.  Nor do you need them immediately or without a check to make sure you are indeed a peaceful law-abiding citizen.  I don't know very many people who want all out bans on guns, just measured to make it much more difficult to buy one.  Guns are meant to cause extreme bodily harm or kill, that's not something you should just be able to stroll to the corner store and buy.  We as a country have proven that we can't handle that.

Well we're going to remain at odds in how we think about legality in general then.
However, you could still use your own argument even from my point of reference and still arrive at your conclusion regarding gun ownership.

I agree with you in that we need to move in the direction of no guns. I don't really have a problem with banning assault weapons, but I must say I don't know a lot about different types of firearms so I don't know what these kind of guns really are. I don't have a problem with reasonable checks either. I'd prefer that cops and the like didn't have access to specific weaponry as well then. And in general we need to clean up the massive corruption in law enforcement.

But yes, general safety can be the starting argument towards disallowing gun ownership. The default is it is legal, but then one sees that there is a problem with it being legal, that a legitimate reason to make it illegal is because gun crime is less in areas that ban it. So even if I disagree with you on illegality being the default, we could potentially arrive at the same conclusion. I just feel there needs to be a compelling reason for the state to intervene in something.

I don't know what degree of regulation would be effective though, especially since pro-gun culture has been a part of things for so long. I'm a bit wish washy on this issue...

The two-party, winner-take all partisan political system is a big part of why America is "more conservative" than other countries.

Another big part is the religious element, but that's a whole 'nother question in itself. Tied to this is the sheer physical and numerical size of the US, the disproportionate influence of the South (which was an agrarian slave society that lagged in economic development, and still does in many ways), the role of slavery, racism, and immigrant tensions in politics, the diversity in America that belies the fact that there is an established hierarchy in America in terms of power and economics...


All of these are factors.

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.

When I said I didn't know much about Greek politics, I'd forgot about that guy. I have heard of him.

Some charming quotes from the leader of the 4th biggest party in Greece:

"Hitler was a mere college-boy compared to the Jews".

"The New World Order means that we are a puppet at the hands of the Jews. Razing. Protocols of Zion. The Global government has taken place in Europe. The common currency too. They are dancing it to their tune. Do you know what kind of money the Jews are profiteering with these ups and downs? We are being led to the fulfilment of targets set 200 years ago."

In 2001, Karatzaferis stated that "the Jews have no right to provoke, because they have filled the world with crimes". "The Jews have no legitimacy to speak in Greece and provoke the political world. Their impudence is crass". In the same tirade, Karatzaferis challenged the Israeli ambassador to come and debate "the Holocaust, the Auschwitz and Dahau myth". Karatzaferis finished by asking "mister Jew ambassador" to "be a bit careful" and warning "the Jews" that if they continued their "insolent behaviour" they were "not going to have a pleasant time". The "insolent behaviour" in question was the Greek Jewish community's response to Karatzaferis's earlier claims that "the Jews" were responsible for 9/11.

Clearly, there is no racism in Greece. At least not at the level of the US...

And the guy described as their leading candidate in the 2004 elections by Wikipedia goes even further:

In the book, Plevris describes himself as a "Nazi, fascist, racist, anti-democrat, anti-Semite" (p. 600), subscribes to the myth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which he presents as authentic and valid evidence against the Jews), characterizes Jewish children in the concentration camps as "very fat" and "well-fed", claims that Jews are "subhuman" (p. 583) "mortal enemies", and criticizes the Nazis for "not ridding Europe of Jewish Zionism". In the same book, he characterizes former UN secretary Kofi Annan as "cannibal" and "descendant of cannibals" and states that Jews need to be "rounded-up and executed within 24 hours", which is "the only way they understand" (p. 742).

He has apparently also written a "vehement polemic against homosexuals".

Even though I'm aware of it I'm always surprised by the level of racism that exists in Europe.

That's pretty disgusting even for the standards of European far-right.

Hell, if somebody was sprouting out that sh*t in f***ing Idaho they wouldn't survive a month into the primaries!

Are you having a rare moment of pride in Idaho?

Nah, just making a point about cultural differences.

To be fair to Greece, LAOS would stand no chance in a "conservative voters" primary, either. There's a reason their leader was kicked out of New Democracy back in the 90s. I think their approximately 5% of the vote nationally is not an unreasonable estimate of what they'd get in the US on a proportional system. (After all, their platform isn't mostly about Jews, even though their leader occasionally goes on anti-Semitic rants--and it would probably be modified to be anti-black or anti-Hispanic or anti-Muslim ranting if it were in the US.)

Meh, good point.
I could see a viruently anti-Hispanic party get 10% of the vote in the States.  After all, this is the same country that had the Know Nothing Movement.  And unlike slavery it really hasn't gone away in parts of the country.  Hell we got politicians pushing forth a repeal of birth right citizenship.  Nativism is a pretty ugly beast.

Because the church has so much influence in the US, unlike other nations.

I don't think there is any comparable anti-Hispanic figure to Hitler...but if someone literally wanted to execute all Hispanics because they're subhuman...I sort of doubt that could get 10% (or even 5%) in the US. If we're talking about "throwing out the darkies becaues they're stealing the jobs and committing crimes (not that I'm racist or anything)" that position regularly gets 10-25% in most European countries.

Yeah I was talking more about the latter view.
Likewise I think Hitlerian views wouldn't get more than 1% popularity (considering how many people there are in the US).

Larger church attendance figures are a reflection of conservatism, not the other way around, imo.

I don't think so. Hell, even Italy legalized abortion through referendum, and not by a court ruling.

Did Hitler actually campaign on exterminating all the Jews?

From what I learned in History of the Holocaust class my senior year in high school: no way.
In fact our teacher emphasized how covert Hitler was about the plans.  Most of the German people had no idea that genocide was happening.  I remember reading about a former member of the Nazi Youth thinking the Allied authorities were telling him lies when he first heard what the Nazi Government did.
That isn't to say everybody was in the dark.  There were quite a few people who did know, but a lot of people thought that all Hitler and his buddies were doing was putting these people in camps.
It wasn't until 1944 before the extent of the Nazi atrocities was realized.

Big congressional districts, the FPTP system, the two-party system, and the fact that the United States is a huge country, where places as liberal as Western Europe, with enough of a population to be a small country, like San Francisco, are mashed together with places that can be as conservative as Saudi Arabia.  The latter is a reason I support decentralization.

Also: my crazy history professor said the Holocaust was not really even Hitler's plan to begin with.

Of course it was not.
Heinrich Himmler seemed to be the brains behind the whole "Final Solution" part of the Nazi regime.  I would argue that Hitler was merely the mouthpiece of the Nazi Party.  Himmler and other military leaders seemed to be the brains behind the government, at least in regards to pacification of "undesirables".

But meh, that is a discussion for another time.

The US is conservative because it's almost impossible for things to change in either direction.  Whether it's because we don't want things to change, or because the sheer size of the country makes things extremely difficult, are some explanations.  It takes very extreme situations to shift America either towards socialism or towards liberalism.

People are simply too entrenched in the status quo.  The result is a corporatist economy, no clear foreign policy, and a weird mishmash of religion and libertine consumer culture.

Wow. That's our number alright.

Warning: This post contains intentionalism.

As for the question, I don't think the United States seemed to be markably more conservative in the era before world war two than most 'developed' countries. In fact, the opposite is in part suggested by thee non-emergence of any real fascistic type movement. (On the other hand this can be balanced by the weakness of the Labour movement and progressivism in general from the 1920s onwards. But the progressive 'movement' and the SPUSA were hardly irrelevancies in their time...). Now happened after WWII is another thing...(May I suggest that the militarization of US society during the Cold war be listed here as a possible factor. The USA is unique among western countries in the political power and social prestige of the military. Which creates political knock-on effects...).

Says  a guy who lives in the most f'd up country on earth.

Hitler didn't campaign on exterminating the Jews in the genocidal sense beause they didn't decide to do that until well after they stopped having elections. He did however campaign on an anti-Jewish platform that goes beyond what I heard from any politicians in the US on Hispanics, for example.

That's an excellent point Sibboleth, that is mentioned rarely.
Liberalism is dead, it is effectively dead since universal male suffrage, because Liberalism has always been, and will always be, an ideology of educated owners.

I'd like to add just one point to the question of American conservatism,, that may sound banal but is important in my view: The wideness of the land.
Not only that class struggle has been avoided because workers could move to the west, but there is also the myth of "Frontier" and "manifest destiny" that helped developing a special culture.
To put it simple: A culture of driving big cars, gun ownership, individual freedom, strong opposition to federal government and anti-bureaucratism.

So I've been reflecting more on this question, and my answer  now is:

Large sections of America were agrarian for a long time. Additionally, America's largest single region was an ultra-hierarchical, authoritarian slave society for a very long time. So social/cultural conservatism is rooted in that. Agrarian societies tend to be very slow-paced, and  not accustomed to change.

As for the industrialized parts of America-those are and always have been where the wealth and intellectual power of the nation is concentrated, which, in a capitalist society,  translates to real power. Thus, America has always been a nation that has embraced government when it helps  the interests of business, and attacked government when the interests of business are being replaced by the interests of people in general. Egalitarianism is not in America's makeup., because the combination of agrarian respect for authority, the legacy of slavery and pervasive racism in the whole country, and the metropolitan areas' capital and resource advantages over the rural parts of the nation have lead to a profoundly contradictory political situation.

On the one hand, agrarian, rural, and working-class interests are deeply resentful and suspicious of the urban elites who control government, business, institutions in general, media, popular culture-the list goes on. But on the other hand, egalitarian, left-wing, and liberal ideas are toxic to many rural people, since they are propagated by or associated in large part with members of  the urban intelligentsia, the academic, the professional, the arrogant, the condescending elite. That, plus white anxiety over poor people of color on the one hand, and resentment at the "liberal elites" in the cities on the other, leads to not just a conservative, but a reactionary right-wing political consciousness.

So you have liberal Democrats, who are an interesting combination of well-educated, upper-class people and working-class to poor people, many of whom owe much to government due to living in metropolitan areas where ordinary people have more contact with the government, whether it be in the form of welfare, contracts, direct employment, great public schools, etc.

And then you have conservative Republicans, who are largely rural or have rural heritage these days (exurbs and some suburbs), where outsiders are suspected, where family, church, and local ties are more important, and where people resent government intrusion into their lives, even when it helps them (note: social religious-right conservatism should be understood as local religious intrusion, not government intrusion). Generally in such areas, it is the local businessmen and other people of authority-local and state politicians and officials-who interact with the federal government, and they understandably resent being told what to do by Washington, especially when Washington doesn't listen to local concerns (all politics is local, remember that!) Thus, it is those local leaders who have understandable reason to dislike federal intrusion who are  respected and admired in the conservative, agrarian-minded areas, whose opinions carry much more weight in the small towns and farm  communities than the academic musings of a professor or researcher in a metropolis.

So you really have a combination of things: provincial, authority-minded rural agrarian people, or who identify with that heritage, who are conservative and Republican; urban, well-educated people, as well as urban poor and working-class people, who directly see their tax dollars working for their benefit, and who are more oriented towards a sense of social justice, whether out of self-interest or for altruistic reasons, who vote Democratic: and the wealth being concentrated in the urban areas, the rural areas resenting that, as well as general white anxiety over issues of race and class.

The reason that America is so conservative in practice is because of these things, plus the profoundly pro-status quo political superstructure of the county, which makes real, meaningful change and cooperation (rather than partisan,emotionally-charged politics) all that more difficult.

1. Religion
2. Racism
3. Electoral system (plurality, first-past-the post, etc) that restricts the number of viable parties to two
4. Legislature that curtails public sentiment (every state getting 2 senators regardless of population and then the 3/5 filibuster supermajority makes the Senate a black hole of progress)

Its because things aren't really that bad over here.  You can be pretty uneducated and still afford a decent apartment and a car.  If you need healthcare you can go to an emergency room and stiff the hospital on the bill.  They won't drag you into court over it.  Why have universal health care when you can just rip the system off?

The issue of race can't be ignored.  The minute a Democrat signed the Civil Rights Act the South went from being Democratic to being Republican.

Another issue is the system.  In a parliamentary system Bachmann would never have gotten as far as she has.

General ignorance.  Americans as a whole are easily duped.  They glorify politicians where as in other countries the average citizen is skeptical about anything ANY politician says.  Over here if you disagree with a Republican politician you are "unamerican."  The Republican party is like a cult.  Its leaders can say anything and its taken as a fact, "You'll be murdered if you don't own a gun.  Tax cuts increase revenue.  Global warming is a hoax.  Iraq has WMDs.  Sure your 75 year old grandmother with DM, COPD, CAD, and metabolic syndrome can buy health insurance for $15,000 a year.  Obama is a Muslim.  Obama was born in Kenya.  White people can't find jobs because of Affirmative action.  The war on drugs is a smashing success."  It just goes on and on.

I would guess lower population density.

Scandinavia wants a word.

Also, the left is pretty arrogant (and has been for decades) with their pet obsessions that usually alienate people: internationalism, environmentalism, feminism, civil rights, gay marriage, etc. The posts on this board are the best proof for that. If they stuck to economics alone maybe they would get some traction. Right now it is not considered decent to vote for a political group that is so hostile to the traditional people and culture of this nation. 

I'd argue that it comes from the Cold War. The US, in order to oppose the Soviet Union, became somewhat right-wing (despite to this day being more liberal in some aspects than Europe). The rest of NATO, which didn't need to try to be ideological opposites to the Soviet Union, could be more left-wing without McCarthy types screaming "socialism!".

Add abortion to that list and the situation you just described is exactly why I am a Republican. Still, I think this speaks more to maintaining the current political polarization than anything else.

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.

The OP is from Europe.  NONE of the positions you stated in your post are to the left of most Western Northern Hemisphere countries.  That's his point.  Stuff that is just taken as a given by even right wing parties in Europe and Australia is viewed as "pet obsessions" by the right in this country.  He was wondering why that is.

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. I probably don’t need to explain my social views much because I am pretty conservative on everything except the death penalty and immigration, and particularly vehement about abortion and anything to do with sex and drugs.

I feel as though my social views are clearly declining in popularity but I am not sure what is happening when it comes to economics. It seems like the Republicans are as a whole moving away from me, but I don’t see the Democrats moving my direction either. I do think some level of popular opinion will surround my views on spending and the deficit, but the union/manufacturing “Made in America” world is a thing of the past. I am also frustrated sometimes on the lack of products that are simple and made well. I tried to get a new cell phone recently because my old one didn’t work and was irritated to find I couldn’t buy one that didn’t have a camera or a keyboard or a whole bunch of other crap I have no desire to buy. I just want simple things done well and I can’t get it.

But on the whole, I’d say it’s inconclusive at best for my economic outlook and at worst, my views there are dying too. Such is life.

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).


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.


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.


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

I'd counteract that by pointing out that both parties are responsible for this time of rhetoric like mentioned before in this thread

From the Republican/conservative POV-Support Abortion? Your a baby killer? Support universal health care-Your a left-wing Socialist? Support gun control-your an authoritarian on par with Adolf Hitler/Joesph Stalin.

And from the Democratic/liberal or left view-Oppose Amnesty for illegal immigrants/want restrictions on immigration-Your a racist and probably a closeted Neo-Nazi white supremacist. Support Free Trade-Your a job killing heartless crook(picture Mr. Burns from the Simpsons) Support the War in Iraq-Your a warmonger/war criminal.

So this type of extreme talk clearly runs in both parties.

I mean comparing US and British politics, the Republican and Conservative parties stand largely the same on most issues. While the same goes for the Democrats and Labour comparison.

Therefore it's a matter of rhetoric in my opinion.   

No.  You're wrong.  I'm going to guess you've never been to the UK.  That's the OP's point.  Americans don't even realize how far to the right Republican ideas are.  NO major right wing party in Europe supports the extreme positions of the American right.  I don't know what is more disturbing, how right wing Republicans are or the fact they are ignorant about how out of touch they are with the rest of the human race.

No.  You are wrong, again.  Universal condemnation of the Iraq war is not a Democratic idea.  Its a UN idea.  I've got news for my Republican friends the rest of the world views people who still support the Iraq war as warmongering/war criminals.  That's the OP's point.  Even right wing politicians in other countries view the US actions in Iraq as illegal.  The American right exists in its own world quite separate from the rest of reality.

The US right wing doesn't really care what the rest of the world thinks because we didn't elect the rest of the world, we elected the politicians in Washington. That's the point of Democracy--to have those who we elected make such decisions.

Don't get me wrong, invading Iraq was a bad idea but the reason why it was a bad idea was because Saddam didn't actually have WMDs, not because the UN said so.

I was just correcting your friend who was under the mistaken impression that anyone else on the planet thought Republicans ideas are sane... They, in fact, are not.

As to the question of should Republicans care, I would say they should.  If Republicans traveled around the world and looked at alternative ways of doing things they would come up with better policies.  We do some things in this country better than anyone else on the planet but there are some areas in which we are far behind.  If we had listened to the world we could have avoided a costly war.  That alone should give you pause if someone says they don't care what the rest of the world thinks.


And besides, when people say, "I don't care what the rest of the world thinks" credibility points are deducted right off the top.

To offer my rebuttal, I've been outside the US and more specially the UK a couple of times for long periods of time(in matter of fact I just got back a few days ago) I'm also a history/international relations major at college. As well as the fact that I know many Europeans, Canadian's and others from outside the US so I know what is thought of American politics abroad.

So I still stick with my original points Link.

The other poster was simply pointing out that people of both parties are constantly engaging in demonization tactics, as you have done constantly throughout this thread by supplying a couple valid liberal arguments and using that to extend upward to some loaded conclusion like:

• I was just correcting your friend who was under the mistaken impression that anyone else on the planet thought Republicans ideas are sane... They, in fact, are not.
  
• And besides, when people say, "I don't care what the rest of the world thinks" credibility points are deducted right off the top.
• I don't know what is more disturbing, how right wing Republicans are or the fact they are ignorant about how out of touch they are with the rest of the human race.
   

Do you any sense of objectivity when you think about politics? Or is everything just an insult?

The first statement you quoted was hyperbole.  It was meant to be kind of a (bad) joke.  Sorry, I should have been clearer.  I do not think every idea that every Republican has is a bad idea.  Ron Paul's idea about not starting wars every five minutes is a good idea and is accepted in numerous corners of the world.

Quote number two stands unmodified.  I don't care if you are Democrat, Republican, English, Zulu, or Eskimo.  If you say you don't care what the rest of the world thinks you do lose credibility.  I do not know how that is a "demonizing tactic" or a "loaded conclusion."

Quote number three stands as well.  The right wing of this country is out of step with the majority of Western Northern Hemisphere societies and there are a lot of people that don't even realize it.  And I can't figure out which is more disturbing.

I have said positive things about Republican office holders and defended them against what I perceived as unfair attacks.  Just because you chose not to acknowledge those posts doesn't mean they don't exist.





All within 24 hrs.  Looks like someone else might have to walk back some of their own hyperbolic statements.  I await your apology.

If this was a joke than I accept your apology here. (I am assuming your comment in the millionaire building an island thread was also a joke then ???)


I originally thought you meant that everyone (or at least all non-“insane” people) ubiquitously accept this as absolute truth, in which case it is insulting. However, if you were simply stating your opinion than it is fine and I stand corrected.


Since when is most of Western Europe the same as “the rest of the human race”? It’s not like we went into Iraq alone. The UK, Australia, and Poland also invaded. I understand the invasion was not a popular one, but the intent of this comment seemed to be dehumanizing, not just a mere political argument over a legitimate policy difference.
Now for my quote:

I apologize for the first sentence and the use of the word “everything” in the second one because you clearly have some sense of objectivity with regards to politics from the quotes you have supplied and not everything is an insult. However, I for one would appreciate it if in the future you would attack the policy issue at hand rather than the people with whom you disagree. Not every politician on the television set may do that but it is a part of common courtesy and respect.

It would also be nice if you refrain from gloating as you ask for an apology such as this:
It’s rather rude.

Uhhh... Yeah, dude.  That whole thread was a joke.  I can't believe you took it seriously.  My comment wasn't even aimed at you.  I was once again using hyperbole to show the LIBERAL OP how ridiculous his thread is.  I am not one of those people that thinks this is MY country.  You are thinking of the Tea Party crowd.  I don't go around saying "I want MY country back."  I will criticize people if I don't agree with them, but I would never seriously suggest people leave the country because they don't agree with me.