duckzilla wrote:The US is a weird country. On the one hand you have these hardcore anti-communist folks arguing against making people anonymous robots in giant state-controlled industries. On the other hand you have the same folks arguing in favor of making people anonymous robots in their own enterprises. It's not about the people. It's really only about for whom they should work.
It's easier to understand the USA if you think about them not as a unitary country, but as a collection of colonies, that were initially more like separate countries. For them, when the central federal government was created, it was a really big deal, the biggest, as suddenly there was this authority over them that they resented. That explains the part about some Americans' absolute aversion to anything that implies the federal government getting extra powers or setting up some new institution.
The second part is kinda connected to the first point. For colonists, the sense of property ownership must have been much stronger than for people living in non-colonial states. After all, there was nobody else that would take care of them and make sure they can make a living through a system (like it was even during medieval Europe with serfdom). Hence, this obsession with one's own property and this "take it or leave it" attitude that employers have. And since they reject the influence of the state in how they do business, any concerns about their employees must be pretty low on the priority scale. The only thing that seems to change their minds is lawsuits, one of the most popular American sports, after baseball.
From my individual outside perspective, the rural US and the average Republican seems to have a lot in common with average Russians. Low trust in political institutions, all media are fakenews, wild conspiracy theories on pretty much every subject, a weird mixture of "religiosity" and a complete lack of understanding of the simpler core messages of christianity (say, altruism), a low willingness to get vaccinated, etc.
Political orientations are reversed in Europe compared to the USA. The contrast is even bigger between Eastern Europe and USA. The left is conservative, supports a big state, and rejects Western progressive values in Eastern Europe and Russia, while the right is reformist, it supports modernisation and going against traditional values. So basically, the Russian center-right is not conservative, or much less than the left. This might be because Eastern Europe was left behind in terms of industrialisation, so the right feels it's its duty to push for more economic reforms, against an attitude of stagnation supported by traditionalism. The Eastern European right doesn't feel like their countries have reached that stage of development in which big capital owners would want to conserve the status quo. There's just not much to be
conservative about.
