That my friend is a container of excrement.
They invented liberty. Europeans were the first to throw off the shackles of the authority of the church. Europeans were the first to experiment with any form of public policy discussion. Europeans were the first to demand limits on the king. They have not forgotten that history; indeed they cling to it.
We Americans consider us to be a country that was founded on the principle of small government. Kulindahr may have worded it wrongly (it was, after all, Thomas Hobbes who said that the sovereign's power comes from the people) but the principle is widely believed over here. We view ourselves as the first government of our kind, as the people who first enacted such Enlightenment ideas as separation of church and state, as the people who value freedom most. We think of ourselves as an experiment in democracy. To this day we still use such language.
We didn't demand limits on the king, we abolished the monarchy in this country. We didn't "try out" public policy discussion, we gave ultimate authority only to those who had gone through such discussion and been elected by a majority (based on our insanely small voting population at the time). We believe in decentralized government, in separation of powers, in a way the British still haven't caught up to. And as far as the EU is concerned, I think the fact that Governor Perry in Texas has flirted with secessionist language a couple of times in the past several months tells you what America would think of something like that. And we associate bigger governments and governments in charge of more people as more threatening to liberty.
I'm not saying any of that is right, but that is what America's perception of reality is.
By the way I wonder if Americans can talk about Britain as easily as the British can talk about Americans.
Ha, yeah right. I doubt even half of Americans could tell you there's an election coming up, or could name the prime minister as of March 1, 2010 or the party he was from. If you mean culturally, there are a couple of stereotypes but that's it. Americans tend to think of ourselves and our country as having tremendous importance, and everyone else as having very little (except for whoever our current enemy is, whom we argue matters a great deal and is incredibly evil).
The US Democratic party is right-wing when placed on a European scale; most countries in Europe don't even have a political party along the lines of the GOP.
As I said earlier, the British Nationalist Party is about the closest thing to a Republican as you get in the UK, and as far as I understand even they love the NHS.
Comparing that fascist BNP to the GOP is distinctly unfair and inaccurate. There are more issues than health care. The GOP has no platform of removing non-whites from the country, for example. The GOP isn't quite so far to the right as you make it seem. You forget that while our "leftist" party is right-of-center in European politics, our "rightist" party is only slightly to the right of that. The difference between the Dems and the GOP is, on a European scale, quite small. Our fights only seem worse because our system of government doesn't include coalition-building as a matter of course as is true of many European governments. And, unlike in the UK, the opposition party can actually do something about their disagreement with the party in power.
Not really, both houses of Congress is already a sort of hung parliament as it is... if it is believed that the Democrats are just a coalition of different ideologies.
This is a surprise to you? LOL. I thought most Americans prided themselves as being exceptional.
We do think of ourselves as exceptional and are proud of that. But we also think of ourselves as leaders, pioneers, and examples for everyone else. So, naturally, we assume you
used to be different but became exactly like us when you understood our superiority.
And both parties in this country are a coalition of ideologies. This is in no way like a hung parliament. Until January the one party had a super majority, which is rare. And now they have 59 senators and something like a 40-seat majority in the House. It's not hung, our system was just designed to move real slow (emphatically unlike the Westminster system). Speaking as someone who likes neither party but has a slight preference for the Dems, we could do with having a bare majority Republicans in both houses of Congress for as long as we have a Democrat in the White House. I prefer the split like that.
