Posted on 09/09/2012 6:30:50 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Barack Obama has got his post-convention poll bounce, giving him a fresh 4 point lead. But I still think Romney can win in November. Whenever I tell that to a British audience, they react with horror and surprise. Often all they get to see of American politics is the televised highlights of Obama’s best speeches, accompanied by footage of a Republican demanding the return of witch burning. In the British imagination, the 2012 fight is between a charismatic centrist and a wackadoodle Right-winger with more money than sense. Given how plain the choice is, Obama simply has to win.
And yet, Obama still has a fight on his hands. Part of the reason is the grim economic news that doesn't always make it across the Atlantic. Unemployment is high, incomes are stagnating and many live in fear of house foreclosure. But Obama faces a bigger existential problem. The USA does not have Britain’s social democratic consensus: 41 percent call themselves conservative, 36 percent moderate and only 21 percent liberal (and liberal shouldn’t be confused with socialist). The Republican Party enjoys a natural advantage in US politics, which is why the Democrats only won the White House twice from 1980 until 2008 .
Character is fate, and these are some of the things that make Americans more conservative than the British.
1. America is huge. It’s often claimed that the entire population of the world could fit in Texas, with enough room to fit a swimming pool in every backyard. If Americans seem more insular than Europeans, it’s because they inhabit such a beautiful and diverse continent: sunshine in_Florida, ski in Colorado, fall in New England. Having so much space means they don’t share the British obsession with conservation of the natural habitat. Nor do they accept the notion of limits...
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Jeeeeeze!
I always thought the Brits were smarter than that!
Don’t they READ? Or, do they just watch the crap the liars in the media spew?
I guess the entire world is being dumbed down, so that the NWO can save us from ourselves.
Edmund Burke thought Brits were natural conservatives. It only took 30 years of full-on socialism to change all that. Although British Steel and other state-owned firms were priviatized under Thatcher, the NHS and other welfare state institutions remained very much intact.
The US has had 80 years of corporatism. There is no living American with a direct memory of the US as a constitutional republic. Sure, many Americans are natural conservatives, but within a framework of corporatism. Many “conservatives” think that government should “cooperate” with business, just like Clinton said.
I had a British friend visit Oklahoma a few years ago. He was landing at Kennedy in NY and planned to drive to Oklahoma. I asked if he was sure and he said that from looking at the map, the drive should take about five hours.
In the 1980's my dad had friends come in from England to see the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Prior to arrival in OKC they asked if they should be worried about an indian attack. Seriously!!
What? I thought we voted witch burning out of the party platform.
They are real. They’re the constituents obeyed by politicians.
OK, as long as the witch burning is an all day affair and the vendors don’t mind if we bring our own lunch. And beer.
Oh, we're not confused. Not even a little.
“It only took 30 years of full-on socialism to change all that. Although British Steel and other state-owned firms were priviatized under Thatcher, the NHS and other welfare state institutions remained very much intact.”
Britain had the Fabian socialists. They led to the socialist policies of the labor government which by post WWII put most of Britain into a semi-socialist economy. The unions had a lockhold, but in 1979, people got so sick of the costs of them, they voted in Thatcher.
America had the progressives. Their ideas gave rise to Wilson’s interventions and later the New Deal. that empowered unions but in 1945 union abuses shocked America enough that in 1946 the biggest GOP congression gains happened (similar to 2010). there were rollbacks...
But in America we have seen how most of the New Deal and then LBJ’s great society never go rolled back.
USA and Britain are different, but not as different as some might think. It was because of our federal system of government and our tradition of freedom, and economic mobility, that we have been less enamored of socialism.
Excellent article! Good find; thanks for sharing. (And a good one to “share” with your more moderate/liberal friends, since it goes over the issues gently. I just shared it to my Facebook page, for all my liberal-arts-whackadoodle friends.)
I think the Marxist 60s radical burned all the Liberal "Witches" 30 years ago.
Can you point to a "Liberal" like Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson in politics today.
The hard lefties just stole the name liberal, trashed the hell out of it with their radicalism to the point where they wouldn't even call them self Liberal, and then renamed themselves "Progressives."
The reality of the conflict is that 'hard right" or "Christian Right' didn't so much take over the Republican Party, but that the Hard Left has in fact taken over the Democrat party.
30 or 40 years ago, the 'Liberal' bosses of Chicago were knocking the heads of hard left clowns like Obama and Axelrod, not giving them power.
The Republicans are pretty much what they always were. It's the Democrats who have radically changed... For the worse.
“Dr. Stanley” makes a good effort. And then he goes and buys Jonathan Martin’s Politico propaganda about Obama’s ‘conventional’ politics at face value.
Let us know what (if anything) that they say about it, will you?
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