And why does it seem to be enforcing such broad adoption of idea sets that are not necessarily compatible?
To give you an example, I’m not American, and my positions don’t match with those of either of the two large political groupings in the US. I’m simplifying, but broadly speaking, on the apparent (to me) hot button political topics in the US, I’m supportive of many positions on both sides: pro-abortion, atheist, pro-ssm, pro-gun control, against the idea of universal health insurance/care, but pro public health measures and primary care, pro small government and free markets, but believe government has an immensely important role to play in regulating public and quasi-public goods(environment, law and order, infrastructure).
I think(obviously) that these are reasonable positions to hold, and they are about evenly split across the democrat and republican divide. Yet, it seems most people (at least on this discussion board) will hold ideas that are largely congruent with the ‘liberal’ or the ‘conservative’ position. How did these positions come to be? Why do so many people hold them simultaneously?
I’ll try to answer your broader question later, but I want to first point out that the positions you describe are quite close to the Democrat Party, which is considerably to the right of most European parties.
That you think the Democrats oppose smallish government (ignoring U.S. defense industry) and free markets makes me think you’ve bought into GOP propaganda.
Yeah, you pretty much sound like a Democrat to me, too.
Doubtful, since I’m not exposed to any GOP propaganda. It’s the views of people on these boards that I’m going by. I’m not necessarily saying democrats on the board are anti-markets and pro-government(although at least some of the more vocal ones sure seem to be), but they generally seem to be more suspicious of capitalism and business than they are of government. This usually puts me at odds with the liberal posters when I’m reading almost any thread that discusses economic issues here.
For instance, I’m against universal healthcare or health insurance. Isn’t that a fairly big democratic issue? Government’s involvement in secondary/tertiary healthcare should be to focus on ways to make the market function properly, not to replace the market with government or taxpayer run/funded healthcare.
I’m also against direct government involvement in delivery of services where it can be avoided, which again would (it seems from reading this board) put me on the republican side. So, for instance, I don’t support government running public schools. but since education is a quasi public good, I would support government establishing standards(no creationism in science for instance) and providing vouchers/conditional cash transfers. I think this would put me closer to the republicans.
Another issue where I find myself on the republican side - unions. I think they tend to do more harm than good
On the question of free markets, there are young Dopers who’ve recently read Adam Smith or Milton Friedman and rhapsodize on the topic as though they think they’re teaching us something we didn’t already know. But almost all the centrist and progressive Dopers are well aware of the virtues of the free market, just confused at the religious fervor with which some on the Right pursue the concept. Many right-wingers think food and drug safety, and even banknote backing should be done wholly by private entrepreneurs. Once upon a time such thinking was considered “lunatic fringe” but the GOP has become a coalition of the confused, with various strange ideologies.
On the question of “small government,” you may need to define this. For most Republicans, “I want small government” translates as “I don’t like to pay taxes;” yet one of the biggest items in the Federal budget is military spending which is more Republican-supported than Democrat. Republicans will also mention foreign aid as spending they oppose, yet most foreign aid is tied to geopolitics (Egypt, Israel, Pakistan) or given to reconstruct countries U.S. helped destroy (Iraq, Afghanistan). Romney campaigned against Federal support for Sesame Street, but since the government exercises no control over such programming, and the amount of the subsidy is trivial, this is more of a cultural issue than a question of government’s size.
A large number of Americans hold positions that are compatible with major elements of both main political parties.
I suspect if there was a well-organized third party that argued strongly for fiscal sanity and protection of individual freedoms while distrusting the ability of the free market to solve all ills, it’d gain substantial support. Hasn’t happened yet, though.
I didn’t quite understand the gist of the orginal question, so I hope I’m answering it: I think the political spectrum is the way it is because there’s only room for two political parties, so people with diverse ideas will join the party the hate the least. There’s quite a few Republican economic ideas I think are moronic, but I can’t have my own political party. People on this board have called people like me “stupid” and worse, for voting againt their economic interest in order to favor the party that jives with their social and gun control agenda, but the number of these people is not insignificant.
I think this is mostly it. Plus, there are quite a few single issue voters (abortion, gun control, defense) that keep a person either Democrat or Republican no matter what.
As stated, a number of people care or vote for two or three main issues, which immediately concern them, and pay attention to other issues as they become topics in the media. Of equal influence, they side with issues as they best align with their worldview, which is partially a product of nurtured upbringing and anecdotes. It’s been my experience that they often will gravitate towards a given party on these issues, and interpret them within this same scope, for better or worse. When you look at politics, a lot of the attitudes align with the idea known as groupthink.
I’ve been guilty of this on issues, in the past, and it requires quite a bit of effort to really flesh out the complexities of the subjects typically found in politics. There are a ton of misconceptions at work, constantly, and the two major parties play to them, most times, with a lack of empathy. Very simply, it works; especially when you convince people that they have the power to vote, adding “value” to an opinion, but with less emphasis on the responsibility to be impartial and educated on the various topics. We then face the fact, that the entire political landscape makes for prime-time programming, when the fanaticism rivals that of a football game. The media loves and perpetuates it, and people rely on the media for information.
And while the above may have truth to it in a general sense, there is also the fact that divisions exist within a party on a number of issues, just the same. Support can and has been divided on how to best address an issue, even if it’s been agreed upon that there should be action or a general motion.
It seems to me that the reason they are the way they are is more or less an accident of history combined with the complications of the two-party system. For people that vote for the two parties, I don’t know many people that align completely with all of the major stances of the platform, they just end up have a few major issues that make them choose one party or the other.
As an example, I think after the Southern Strategy, with a lot of the Bible Belt swapping over to Republicans, it started to make a lot of the socially conservative and moral issues become a part of their base. To that end, people who opposed those socially conservative stances ended up going to the Democrats, and a few decades later, those ideas are now fairly well ingrained.
And we look at the Republicans now as generally more free-market, true or not, but it was the Republicans at the turn of the 20th century who were very anti-Trust and anti-Monopoly. I think a lot of that changed under the likes of Reagan and Bush Sr. so now 20-30 years later, it’s become part of what people believe Republicans stand for. I think a lot of that wasn’t necessarily those presidents but a fundamental change coming out of a recession and very well might have become a Democratic issue if we’d had a Democrat in office. We could easily see that idea changed depending on our current economic problems and their resolution are viewed a decade or two from now.
Really though, I think a lot of it is just a lot of the party people trying to figure out how to maximize how many moderates they can reach without alienating their base. A good example of this I think might be legalization of marijuana. A lot of the more libertarian Republicans are pushing for it, but they can’t really push for it as a party because they’d alienate the social conservatives and religious right. I think the Democrats haven’t really pushed for it because, until the last few years, it was a losing issue, and most of the people in favor were already in their side but might alienate some moderates. Now that it’s a winning issue in most places, it looks like that will mostly be a Democratic issue and Republicans will end up trying to scoop up anyone the Democrats may alienate with it.
Welcome to the great wishy-washy middle. 
“Independent” or ‘I like a little of both but not all of either party’ is pretty much the majority position in America. We lean a little more one way or the other depending upon the major issues of the day and policy positions of the parties come election day.
This is true, but as a Democrat I believe that this is at least partly due to what most of us believe to be politically feasible.
European liberal* parties, which usually advocate many of the things espoused by Republicans in this country, rarely garner more than a small slice of the vote. But they often do participate in coalition governments, as is currently the case in Germany.
“Liberal” in America usually means the opposite of what it does in Europe. American liberals would tend to be more like the social democratic parties of Europe. I know, most people here already know this, but I think it’s important to bring the point up. It intrigues me that this very conservative political element manages to hang on in Western Europe.
In Britain, Liberals are social and economic centrists.
But I agree that American “liberals” would be considered to be (on the right wing of) social democracy in most of the rest of the developed world, and in many places “liberal” still means being in favor of unconstrained free-market capitalism, a more staid and less starry-eyed version of what Americans call libertarianism.
My cousin is a long-time British Liberal Party activist. He recently mentioned something about attending a “Liberal International” conference, where Liberals from many countries met for discussion. I was somewhat incredulous, and asked how that could possibly be productive, given that “liberal” has such divergent meanings in different countries. He did not really seem to have a good a answer.
As to the OP, you seem to me to have an ill assorted collection of views that would span from one end of the political spectrum to the other in almost any country, not just the United States. The US political spectrum, and the views that it tends to associate together, is not so very different from that in most other countries, except for the fact that its center is shifted far to the right of that of the rest of the developed world.
And there is only room for two major political parties because of the winner-take-all nature of elections in the United States.
If there was a proportional representation system then voters might tend to support smaller parties with platforms they more closely agree with. With a winner-take-all system any support for third parties is often viewed as wasting a vote.
America is an example of a country being run by committee following the rules laid out by another committee from a different era but the current committee cannot fully agree on how to define those rules.
But, somehow it muddles through.