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Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen
I am impressed. This is very perceptive for a person that does not live in the United States. Despite what you are about to be told by the resident proponents of the Right, this is completely true. Comparisons can also be made for the politics of the Left. The result is the stagnation of government. The Right will blame the Left for this. The Left will, in turn, blame the Right. However, the truth is that it is the monopoly of the two-party system is to blame. Americans vote the politics of the Democrats and Republicans in and out of power as a revolving door, and until Americans are willing to realize that these are the politics of failure, we will not see a change.
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Things have changed so much in the U.S. over the last 6 years (and maybe even before that, since the ideologues who are either running the show on stage or behind the scenes were still very active politically while Clinton was in office and very sucessfully used the Lewinsky scandal to sow the seeds of deviseness that is now rampant today in US politics) that even many of us north of the border can see the changes if we bother to look at all (and many of us either don't look, don't care, or in some cases, even like what we see as there are Canadians who would love to see our country resemble much more closely the US).
It is to the point now, the devisive politics which breed a kind of 'fanatacism' about them (which is evident in the ever shrinking 'swing vote'), that its invaded American popular culture which Canadians are big consumers of (much more so than any other country in the world). We see it now not only in your news, but also in ordinary TV shows (which make up a substantial portion of our television programming), movies, music, and even popular literature. I was shocked at the political bias that was so evident in two of the recent American novels I'd read, both thrillers, that overtly had nothing to do with US politics but which both novelists (one left-wing, one right-wing) had managed to inject into the novels through the language they used, the characters and events and the way they depicted them, etc.
Aside from that, I also worked for 18 months, prior to my current job, with a U.S. company here in Canada where I provided tech support to its American internet subscribers (this is part of the US "outsourcing" that has been occuring since Free Trade and NAFTA, where the low tech low paying work is being done by sweat shops in Mexico and elsewhere while the former middle class, median wage higher tech jobs are outsourced to Canada, India, and elsewhere). Anyway, even though my job had nothing to do with politics, in the course of over 10,000 calls - many of them between 20 minutes to an hour or more - there is a lot of "dead time" on the call where small talk is essential and where it was often easy to nudge the caller into the political realm, as I'd prefer to hear their views on that (whether they were right-wing or left-wing) than discuss how the Boston Redsox were doing or how windy it was in Chicago; this was particularly easy during the run-up to the 2004 election and its aftermath. So you listen to enough people from all kinds of backgrounds and over the course of a year and a half, while keeping up on the news and coming from sociological/economics background in University, you get a good feel for the political climate down south...
One of my most memorable calls was from a black Vietnam veteran who was wounded over there and has been living on his VA disability ever since. I'd fixed his problem in about 5 or 10 minutes but let the conversation run on at least another half hour as he vented about how f*cked over he felt by the current government of the country he'd put his life on the line for and been maimed in the process. It was mostly memorable because the guy still had his sense of humour and wasn't only passionate, and dead on I thought about everything we talked about, but could make you laugh even while discussing some pretty bleak stuff. Anyway, that is kind of off topic but being Canadian and very openly anti-Bush I get a lot of "you hate the US/you hate Americans" which is kind of absurd when you consider that if it were true then there's no way I could have worked at one of the most stressfull/highest rates of burnout occupations for so long and while working supposedly for and with people "I hate" when I could have taken a job with a Canadian company, dealing with Canadian customers for the same pay at any time... which is what I eventually did do, but only because the job had lost any challenge (become too monotous) while at the same time I'd had enough of management and their asinine policies and office politics (but I have no preference for American or Canadian clients, and treat them no differently, since at the end of the day its all the same paycheck no matter who you work for or work with).