I gave examples of liberal ideas that are widely supported, this is less about what people say and more about what their actions show. Liberal ideas are very popular, liberals themselves not, because people are peasants who are too stupid to know what’s good for them 
^You answer your own questions. Any political movement of the left-regardless of its ideological content-that does not have a popular orientation is little more then an exercise in intellectual and emotional masturbation.
I consider myself, by American standards, economically centrist and socially liberal/libertarian. This makes me practically a right-wing anarchist here in Germany!
My reported scores:
Economic Left/Right: -0.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.1
So, I am very definitely economic centrist with a tiny push left, and strongly Libertarian vs Authoritarian, very much as I expected.
Centrist positions: gradualism vs revolutionary change, support of capitalism in general but with common-sense anti-trust and environmental regulations, free trade, public-option for health care but not single payer, public schools being well-funded but possible support for vouchers, marijuana decriminalization (61% support!), same-sex marriage, limited but actual welfare state, abortion as ‘safe, legal and rare’, real sex-education in schools, lowering the cost of higher education, some agricultural subsidies but nothing like the huge levels there are now, support for skilled immigration and ‘multiculturalism’ but belief in the importance of integration as the goal, and many more.
Obama and Clinton are both centrist politicians that I am comfortable and happy to support. Michael Bloomberg is an economic centrist but a nanny-state authoritarian.
I represent centrism in America today. Anyone more liberal than I am is a communist. Anyone more conservative than I am is fascist.
I bet you drive just at the right speed, too.
Yes indeed.
Just to show how the UK differs from the US, our Prime Minister endorses:
- strict gun control (not even for home defence :eek:)
- the National Health Service (taxes pay for health insurance for all)
- abortion
- gay marriage
- evolution
- minimum wage
and he belongs to the right-wing Conservative party. 
I would somewhat dispute that Cameron supports the NHS in actuality. He accepts it, sort of. But I wouldn’t say he’s fond of it.
The silly “zomg America’s so much more conservative then the rest of the world that Obama would be a Legitimist advocating restoring the House of Bourbon in France!!!:):D:):D” is a retarded trope that needs to be euthanized as quickly as possible. Keep in mind most European conservatives have been far more hardcore austerians then Obama ever was and quite open about measures such as raising the retirement age. Most Republican politicians basically accept evolution and minimum wage while I might note that NHS is more comparable to Medicare in practical political terms in that it’s an already established ultra-popular program (and of course as others note, the Tory vultures are obsessed with cutting). I might further add that most Tory MPs voting against the measure legalizing gay marriage.
In the US? The proper speed seems to be 10-over, except in school zones where there are speed cameras, and if it is snowing heavily, the proper speed is reduced to only 10-over.
[snip]
Actually that points looks like it, because it is clear that you have to resort to a straw man to make it.
Among Republicans evolution is on the way out.
Just about the only part that looks to check as European conservatives being more conservative than the Americans are in economical issues, but even there the picture is not as clear as you want it to be.
I was being somewhat hyperbolic but I’ve seen people unironically argue on this forum and elsewhere that Barack Obama and even Bernie Sanders would be right-wingers in an European political context.
Which is why I said Republican politicians. George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney all had no problem with evolutionary theory and I highly doubt a thrice-divorce New York billionaire whose biggest theological influence is modernist heretic Norman Vincent Peale does either.
And that is a valid point. Any country’s political leadership are going to be the definition of where that country’s “center” is. But, given that politicians are well known for dissembling and subterfuge, effectively subverting the genuine democratic process, it is not clear whether the political “center” accurately reflects the broader popular “center”.
I believe that most people, or at least many, when led to thoroughly examine the details of an issue, will often choose a position or compromise that does not fit the general doctrine of the “side” they claim to identify with. Factionalization is very clearly not a benefit to the system, or at least not to the leaders of factions. It is the overtly dogmatic ideologues that we ought to oppose, not all of those other fucking morons.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201686.html
I was aware of that dog whistle that was done years ago, As for Donald Trump, seeing how he has fallen for anti vaccination and the denial of human caused climate change I have to wonder of far his crank magnetism goes so I would not be surprised to find that he is also in favor of “teaching the controversy” as Trump has “evolved” into dumping his more progressive past positions.
Actually, I was signalling TriPolar that I got his joke. Presumably he was riffing on a quip by comedian George Carlin.
It’s clear that was a brief line of pandering and not consistent with Bush’s actual views on evolution. Note that European countries such as Britain has its own problems with creationism being taught in publically-funded schools. As for TRUMP’s positions, note that while pseudoscience is a trait that all prone too, certain demographics are more prone to particular varieties of it. Much as young earth creationism is a sibboleth in many fundamentalist circles, the same is the case with anti-vaccination in parts of the upper middle class.
You claimed that Bush had no trouble, in reality he had, and even in the interview it is clear that the wants to have it both ways.
As for the England red herring: That goes for local government entities that are forbidden also to teach creationism in government funded schools, and considering that the article refers to new rules one has to assume that most of the politicians in power in Britain favor those rules against teaching creationism.
Bottom line: Creationism or ID has no place in public schools.
And finally: there is no Democratic candidate to the presidency or very important Democratic congress people that is against vaccines. And in the USA there was not much of an upper class or middle class divide regarding anti vaccine beliefs; until 2009 the main difference was age, younger people are more willing to believe in anti vaccination because they never experienced the struggles of the past; but since 2009 there is a noticeable partisan difference. With big Republicans politicians disturbingly being more willing to set this as a wedge issue and appearing to be then more in favor of “choice”. A very typical move for panderer and denier alike.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/vaccines-bipartisan-support-114915
I am not sure I fully agree with that. We should teach religion in school: not the how but what it is and the why it exists, encompassing the broad range of religion. Based on that, you can teach Creationism/ID in public schools, as long as you frame it in the context of the scientific method contrasting its origin and development with that of actual bioscience. As in, “ID is based on some guy breathed a lot of brimstone fumes an in his dizzy condition, made these ponderous pronouncements, which were frantically backfilled as they were overrun by later discovery” vs “some folks looked at how things are and worked gradually backwards to figure out how things got to be this way, building a big model based on observation.”
Young people, most of them, are not stupid. If you show them the entire picture of the “controversy”, a few of them will clutch their cherished beliefs tightly to their chests, but the ever important group that could come down on either side will reject ID in droves.
Frankly, I think schools desperately need to require at least two full credits of Bullshit! to graduate high school – that would greatly reduce the popularity of Chemtrails! and Illuminati! and Scientology.
Creationism is hardly the only model of pseudoscience in the world of biology. It’s not even a singular thing. There are a million different models of it; because it doesn’t correspond to any reality anybody can spout their delusions and claim them as truth.
And it’s not just that Creationism cannot be usefully taught. Why single it out of all the other delusions? Why make teachers waste their time in learning enough of the ever-shifting details to be able to authoritatively teach it? Why waste students time when we can’t get through a fraction of what’s teachable as it is?
I’m pretty sure you aren’t American. No American could believe that. Students are currently being taught proper biology and rejecting it. How could that get better if you taught Creationism as well? Merely by presenting its argument you’d give it an imprimatur that would increase its status and believability.
Austerity has wide backing in Europe, which explains why fringe parties have had a new lease in life.
I disagree about evolution. As for GWBush, his public statements matter a lot more than his personal beliefs expressed in an obscure interview. (Just as the personal beliefs of the public matter more than the personal beliefs of one politician or another.)
Politically the NHS is indeed comparable to Medicare: both are almost third rails. But that’s telling, since the NHS involves government owned hospitals (like those of the Veterans Administration): if something like that for the wider public isn’t far left in the US, I’m not sure what is.
More generally, unions are much more politically powerful in all other major OECD countries. (By major, I mean to set Luxembourg et al aside. Goddamn it, I see that a bunch of middle income countries have joined the OECD in the past decade. Ok, let’s say, “Advanced or Upper Income countries”. Except France which has less union representation than the US but substantially higher top-down regulation of labor markets. FWIW, South Korea and the US are basically a tie in terms of unionization.)
I’m intrigued to see that focusing in on America’s political “center” led to … evolution(!), with half of Republicans agreeing that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” (Note that this view rejects astronomy and geology as well as biology.)
I guess that makes GWB a typical “centrist:”
[QUOTE=George W. Bush]
I think evolution can — you’re getting me way out of my lane here. I’m just a simple president. But it’s, I think that God created the Earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty, and I don’t think it’s incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.
[/QUOTE]
Would European and Canadian Dopers feel insulted if I ask how widely supported creationism is in their venues?