I don’t think lumping people into groups like this can ever be accurate. I don’t fit into any of your groups, and I’m sure many others don’t also. If you had 100 groups rather than 10 you would still have some people who couldn’t be accurately included in any of them.
The first three categories wouldn’t exist. From what I understand what we call a “conservative” in the US really doesn’t exist anywhere else. The concept of american conservatism and smaller less intrusive government along with lower taxes and more personal responsibility is totally foreign to socialist Europe for instance.
IMO, it’s for this reason that America is the sole superpower on the face of the planet. If the Liberals had their way we would raise taxes to 70% or so, use the money to pay for socialized medicine and a much larger government in general. The military would be cut to a fraction of what it is now. We’d become not a bad place to live, but not the USA that I know and love. We’d be a second rate country like France or Germany. Our military and economy would no longer lead the world.
Then how did Maggie Thatcher win so many elections in the UK? Wasn’t her program all about those things?
Maybe. I’m basing my statements mostly on what I’ve seen many European dopers say in response to seeing an American conservative viewpoints here on the boards. I would think that while Thatcher was privatizing some government and opposing some unions during the 80’s in England, Reagan was probably doing some more serious cutting of the government back here in the US.
I just want to say thank you for the posts and links, BrainGlutton. This is one of the more interesting things I’ve read for a long time.
I don’t dispute the Pew typography (as it applies to the US) but if you notice, there is no significant grouping for true leftists, ie, socialists, communists…That’s one big difference I can see between US and Europe.
Out of curiousity, what grouping would a US “progressive” with socialist leanings fall into, as it stands now? Are they a measured subset of liberal democrats, or do they exist in such small numbers as to be statistically insignificant?
As a democratic socialist, I’ve wondered/worried about that too. I would say the latter – a subset of the “Liberal Democrats,” too small in numbers to form a measurable fraction of the general population.
But bear in mind that statistically insignificant is not the same thing as historically insignificant. If you form a list of all prominent American political leaders, political thinkers, and political activists of the past century, there will be a very significant number of socialists of various kinds on that list. But, unlike their counterparts in Europe and most of the industrialized world, they have not been able to build up a corresponding mass-based following.
It is a remarkable fact that the United States is the only industrialized nation where no communist, socialist, social-democratic, or labor-based political party has ever played an important role in national politics. In their book It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks study the question and conclude the failure of socialism here resulted from a combination of factors, including:
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American poltical culture is uniquely antistatist, individualist and libertarian, even compared with other English-speaking countries.
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Leaving out the systematic submergence of certain ethnic and racial groups, there has never been a rigid social (as distinct from economic) class system in the United States, such as characterized the societies of Marx’s Europe.
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Unlike their counterparts in Western Europe and elsewhere, American socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries failed to build a power base in the labor unions, which were mostly concerned with bread-and-butter issues like wages, hours and working conditions.
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Unlike their foreign counterparts, American socialists failed to build alliances with traditional religious believers, and in fact alienated them, to the point where the American Catholic clergy became openly hostile to socialism.
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In the early 19th century, European socialists got their foot in the door, and established their political presence as defenders of the people, by campaigning for such things as press freedom and universal suffrage. Although these were radical ideas in Europe at the time, they were well established (at least, universal suffrage for white males regardless of wealth was well established) in the United States from earliest decades of the republic, which deprived American socialists of the opportunity to fight for them here and reap political benefits thereby.
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The winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system marginalized American socialists, compared with other countries that had proportional-representation systems. This systemic barrier, however, has marginalized all American third parties of all ideologies.
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The American federal system prevents Congress, if it ever had a socialist majority, from enacting any thoroughgoing program of socialism on a national scale. However, this cuts both ways: The federal system also provided socialists with more opportunities to contest and win elections at the state and local levels. (See below.)
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Although American socialists won important offices at the state and local level in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and even controlled the governments of some cities, socialist leaders at the national level failed to build on these achievements. In fact, such non-revolutionary municipal reforms local socialist leaders were able to achieve – publicly owned utilities, etc. – were dismissed and derided as “sewer socialism” by national party leaders.
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Compared with more practical and compromise-oriented socialists in other countries, American socialists were unfortunately given over to extremism, sectarianism, and splitting over minor points of doctrine.
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The ethnically diverse character of the American working class led American workers to identify with their ethnic group before their class, inhibiting the development of “class consciousness” here. White American proles, for instance, have never wanted to think of themselves as being in the same social class as the blacks.
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The Socialist Party made the crucial mistake of opposing U.S. entry into World War I. This made the party much more popular among German-Americans, but it also drove a lot of Anglo-Saxons out of the party, especially in the Midwest.
For some reason, Marks and Lipset end their analysis with the 1930s and '40s – the period when much of the Socialist Party’s agenda was co-opted by Roosevelt in the New Deal; the party became even more marginalized by sectarianism; many of the Communist Party members, on Stalin’s orders, hid their party affiliation while they sought positions of influence in government and the labor unions, and indeed went so far underground that those who escaped the McCarthy-era purges gradually stopped being Communists at all; and the Cold War taught Americans to identify the idea of socialism with treason. But the political upheavals of the '60s and ‘70s apparently do not even merit discussion as lost opportunities for socialism in America, in Marks’ and Lipset’s view.
These excerpts from the Wikipedia might also help us put these “left-right,” “liberal-conservative” questions into perspective.
If we’re taking the entire nation and placing it in one camp or the other, we’re making bad assumptions about people’s beliefs.
I will say, my opinion on the matter is that Americans are tilted more towards the liberal side of the scale.
My opinion is based on the observation of what I am going to call “Bait Bills”, referendums added to the ballot.
The purpose of these bait bills was to pull in more people towards one side or the other. Several states had referendums on the ballot to ban gay marriage or otherwise amend the definition of marriage within said states. Enough ultra-conservatives felt so strongly about this issue that they mustered grassroots support for it through a network of well funded religious centers.
Given the relatively narrow margin by which Bush became elected I believe that these “bait bills” made all the difference in the world. Folks who normally wouldn’t be that concerned with the presidency and who might not have cared one way or the other came out to vote for Bush, because he was on their side.
In all honesty, I felt that both candidates were owned by the same people, had basically the same views, and had very similar backgrounds. Many other people I know were still trying to make up their minds as they went to the booth.
I think the democrats got pegged by a savvy republican electoral strategy.
With the absence of said bills, I do not believe that Dubbya would have gotten elected again. Since this would have given both sides a similar strategic advantage, my belief is that the nation is somewhat more liberal. As it stands, the democrats lost out because of whining, infighting, and a poor grasp of strategy.
If the democratic party could pull itself together and start planning for the long term, avoid petty bickering and whining, and present a more unified front they stand a decent chance of winning in 2008.
Comments? Evidence? As I said, this is simply my opinion.
Intellectual dishonesty, or just an accidental strawman?
Bush did not lie. He was mistaken, in good faith, about the presence of WMD, as were many others, even before his administration came along.
Now, you may argue that to make a mistake of that caliber is egregious; this is a very supportable view. But to dismiss by omission the inference that he was acting in good faith, and say “he lied” as though it is proven truth… is very dishonest.
Fact: Bush claims to have invaded Iraq because it was a hostile nation in possible possession of WMDs.
Fact: No WMDs were found.
Fact: We KNOW that North Korea has nukes.
Fact: Even though they are incredibly hostile towards us and our allies, we did NOT invade North Korea
Let me break this down:
==========WMDs?=== Oil?===== Hostile?
North Korea----yes----------no-------------yes
Iraq------------maybe-----yes, lots---------yes
And this is if we assume that there may have been WMDs in Iraq, even though we can’t find a pip on the ol’ geiger counter(maybe it’s busted?)
Conclusion: Bush invaded Iraq to
a) finish the job his daddy started
b) carry on a family vendetta
c) get his hands on the oil pump
d) all of the above
Take your pick, but the evidence tells me and anyone willing to look at it logically that he and his administration lied to the american people.
I know you qualified it with a “probably”, but that was one funny sentence, dude. Almost fell out of my seat.
Not to say he wouldn’t support cutting government, but even thinking that that happened in the 80’s is funny. If cutting government actually happened, we wouldn’t have had the massive deficits we do now.
Especially compared to Thatcher, he did not actualize a relative cutting of government. Now, one might argue that the end product even after Thatcher’s reforms was still a more “liberal” England, and I wouldn’t disagree.
Your ability to believe the White House spin, without the slightest skepticism or cynicism, does you proud. You have most definitely earned your Loyal Fox News Fan™ button and hat, mon ami.
But that was mainly due to his determination to build up our defense establishment – something which many conservatives, consciously or unconsciously, seem to omit from their definition of “government” whenever they talk about “cutting government.” As it turns out, severing military from non-military spending policies is extraordinarily politically difficult. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan#Domestic_record:
I think you may be right about this. Conservatives these days are quite noisy and therefore very noticeable, where as in the 60’s liberals were noisy.
But Reagan was president a generation ago…
Up to now I never thought of the Eighties as “a generation ago” . . . but you’re right. Twenty years is a generation. Time does fly, doesn’t it?
(We need a smilie for a look of mildly surprised bemusement.)