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leonine -> RE: Why Obama scares conservatives. (11/4/2012 6:48:32 AM)
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For foreigners, it's necessary to remind ourselves that the US political scale is like nothing else in the developed world. What you call the extreme left would be considered slightly right of centre in Europe or Japan, and what the rest of the world call socialists would be so far off the US scale that your commentators couldn't even see them.
This is partly historical, but more recently a product of a long game by neo-conservative institutions to establish their ideology as the only orthodoxy. In the rest of the world, these economic and political ideas were so intensely promoted that a lot of governments were led to experiment with them, until it became clear that they weren't working, since when we've been cleaning up the mess. In the US, they are so embedded in the system that even the worst failure since the '30s has made little impression.
But just as the Soviet system was finally undermined by better communications showing the masses that there was a viable alternative, the US orthodoxy is also falling victim to exposure to foreign ideas like a healthcare system that doesn't add bankrupcy to illness, or labour unions that aren't considered either gangsters or subversives. Nobody who has picked up these ideas can vote for them, because the political system is still excluding them as effectively as ever, but they will vote for the nearest thing the system allows; and even that was not supposed to happen.
And just like any other ruling group, the white Xian neocon one reacts to the slightest loss of power and privilege by crying victim and howling that it'll be concentration camps tomorrow.
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