World Politics vs. American Politics

I have a theory. The mutual misunderstanding of politics between the U.S. and the rest of the world is a large cause of internal political anger right here in American politics.

(Let me note here that I know the United States is not the only country in America. However, rather than continually referring to things as having to do with the United States of America, I'm going to abbreviate for the sake of efficiency and call those things "American.")

Perhaps most people don't understand that American politics can be very different from world politics. After all, despite what many of you may think, the U.S. has never been under the control of fascists, communists, or otherwise tyrannical dictators, despots, or monarchs. Here I'm including a picture to illustrate a simple version of world politics.

What you can see is very basic. We have two major axes symbolizing equality and order. As you move higher on the equality axis, government is geared more and more toward ensuring that members of the community are equal. The common left wing of the world heads toward socialism, sometimes degrading to its extreme form known as communism.

Conversely, moving down the axis of order, we come to world conservatism which demands that a few rights be waived for the sake of societal order. The extreme form here is of course fascism, where order, nationalism, and the state supersede all else. It should be noted as well that under both extremes, rights and individuality end up revoked by government.

At point (0,0) between the two axes we find world liberalism, or what is sometimes called "classical liberalism." The philosophies surrounding this point were pioneered by writers such as Mill and Locke, and were consequently taken by the founders of the U.S. and infused into the fabric of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The idea here is that liberty should be placed as the highest priority without government intervening "inappropriately" to advance either equality or order.

Now let's zoom in on the graph a bit.

Being founded mainly upon classical liberal principles, and also because the U.S. has never been under the control of an absolute ruler, mainstream American politics has traditionally not ventured beyond the shaded area on the graph. Although a few policies have come closer to world conservatism or socialism (a couple of particular targets for such accusations are the Patriot Act and Social Security), the left and right wings have so far been able to check each other sufficiently enough that the USA houses neither a communist nor fascist party strong enough to present viable candidates. In essence, the actual range of mainstream American politics is much smaller than the range of politics in many other places in the world.

The problem comes then, when those who are not Americans but perhaps live within the current sphere of American international hegemony seek to compare what happens in the U.S. with what has happened in their own various countries over time. In this case, and as Americans seek to make the same comparisons, we begin to hear accusations of "fascist!" coming from the American left, and "communist!" coming from the American right directed toward their respective political opponents.

In reality the United States has never come anywhere near fascism or communism. Instead, when American political views drift toward the edges of classical liberalism -- further toward world socialism or world conservatism -- the opposing American side generally goes berzerk, drawing upon exaggerated notions of that drift.

By the same token, a European may learn that the "conservative party" has won the election in the U.S. and assume that America has moved much closer to fascism than it actually has since the word carries very different connotations in these two regions. Thus, I present the crux of my theory: that much of the political fear and anger experienced by Americans, and many of the ridiculous accusations made by either side can be traced back to improper comparisons of American politics to world politics.

This, of course, is not to say that without improper comparisons we would have political peace. Rather, it is partly the perpetual recurrence of these comparisons that causes the inflammation of our debate into the ridiculous demonization of those who may be on the opposing side.