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Politics : CD's Incoherent Ramblings and Politics for Dummies Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (95)	10/21/2007 4:22:49 PM
From: LoneClone	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 361

Again I invite you to try to don the viewpoint of a non-United Statian. Your seeming inability to do so is a symptom that argues against your position. Yours is the equivalent of claiming two beans are very different while ignoring the brussels sprouts and turnips and carrots and potatoes all around you that everyone else can see, and that make the beans look virtually identical if you are able to see anything else. The differences you outline are certainly real, but most are merely tactical rather than philosophical, and the latter are inconsequential compared to the range of political opinion in play in the rest of the liberal democracies. One of the key factors that makes the range of American political opinion so narrow is the influence of religion. Religion is a huge factor in American politics, but the religion of a political candidate never comes up in Canada. Other than our current Prime Minister Harper, who is an American-style evangelist, I couldn't tell you the religion of any more than one or two of the hundreds of Canadian politicians I have looked at closely. Even Harper is smart enough to never mention his politics outside certain closed circles, and any politician who tries to make religion part of his campaign commits political suicide, as really happened when the leader of the provincial Ontario Conservative party made his number one issue in the recent election government funding of private religiously-run schools, and thereby handed the incumbent a majority win and consigned his political career to the scrap heap. But in the US, religion is always at the forefront, and the certainty of the One Truth that comes from the influence of evangelism is used to bludgeon anyone who strays from the straight and narrow even on issues that are not ostensibly about religion. It is this preponderance of evangelism and the certainly it imbues in its proponents that they are the chosen ones with the only truth, that feeds the divide-and-conquer tactics followed by the neo-liberals in both the Democratic and Republican branches of the governing party. And this is the key factor that renders United Statian politics so homogenous when viewed from outside. LC