Forboding Angel wrote:FLOZi wrote:US politics were doomed when John Reed died.
Re: Crookedness, not heard about the expenses scandal in britain then forb?
No I hadn't heard anything abotu it. The thing that is completely hard for me to understand is that all these other countries have liberals, conservatives, etc, but the values of your parties vs ours here in the states are completely different. It's very hard to follow.
Like from what I've seen of your guys conservative party is more or less a mixed bag of nutjobs that won't control over everything including where you shit the next time, which is essentially what our liberal party wants and ./mindfuck
This shit is really fucking confusing. It's like you guys using the metric system while we use a mix of standard and metric, it's completely different and I don't even understand the values of your political parties, they seem to be all over the map and it seems as though each party is extreme in some way whereas our parties are comprised of a gradient of one side to moderates where moderates and independents comprise the bulk of the country's voting populace.
Not really. Our Conservative party believes in reducing abortion rights, has a terrible record on gay rights, yet spouts nonsense about reducing the control of the state (in actual fact - cutting vital public sector jobs).
Historically the liberal party (now Liberal Democrats after joining with a a split off from the Labour party, the Social Democrats) was the party of 'free trade' and laissez faire economics, but since thatcher onwards the Conservatives have been fully committed to neo-liberalism, as have Labour since Blair (even since Kinnock). The liberals were also traditionally the party of social liberty compared to the conservatives who wished to maintain the current social order (Hard to draw comparisons on that one as class in the US is purely an economic construct with no aristocracy, the only aristocracy is wealth) which meant they were originally the party of the working class, at least those few members of it with the vote.
Labour changed all that and was fundamentally different, not just because of its economic outlook but the way it was built and influenced by the working class and trade union movement. The US never really had an analogue to the Labour party, at least not on the same scale of influence (Socialist Party of America would probably be the closest example).
However in a pattern repeated across Europe, all 'Conservative', 'Liberal', and 'Labour/Social Democrat/'Socialist'' parties are now essentially homogeneous in their economic, and in most cases political, goals. Though they like to blow up any minor differences in view as evidence that the system provides us with a real choice every 4 years - much like the US.
