American Political System Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Fast Eddie: Hmm. Needs to be Troper-ed up a bit. I'll take a swat at it. Hard to do, without making it partisan. // later: Okay, that's all I've got. Couldn't touch the Parties bit without getting partisan.

Sabel4: Just a note - there are a lot of libertarians who would be offended by being lumped in with the republicans. Otherwise, looks good (although not as cynical as my view.)

Smapti: Not to diminish the Libertarian party in any way, but there is a libertarian wing of the Republican party which is worth mentioning even if it's not very influential at the moment. Ron Paul, for instance, is indisputably libertarian in his outlook.

Fast Eddie: Okay, Shire Nomad, why are you going through cutting the funny without any discussion? You can bet your sweet bippy it is going right back in.

Shire Nomad: Apparently someone cut in line while I was still editing. When I saved my changes, the funny added in the meantime got wiped.

Fast Eddie: Ah. A lock-stomp. It happens. Didn't seem like your usual pattern of helpfulness.

Seth: ''There is a feeling among some Americans that there may be a reality distortion field of some sort that follows the outer edge of the DC Beltway (a highway that circles DC).

Just so you know the british have similar feelings about Milton Keynes - if you don't understand what i mean than you have never been there and thus should be glad. The whole town is... fake. For lack of a better word. Artificial and concrete, even the plants (Fake looking plants, all perfectly square) grow out of concrete. In perfectly zoned squares. And each plot is the same as the identical one, one block over. If you walk in a straight line for long enough in Milton Keynes, you will eventually see all of Milton Keynes and find yourself back where you started.

Duckluck: Shouldn't this entry say something about Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, and other US territories/commonwealths/glorified colonies? Puerto Rico has about 4 Million people these days and is not something to be written off entirely.

HeartBurn Kid: Indeed it should. I would add something myself, but my knowledge of the effects on the American political system on the American territories is extremely limited. I know they do not receive Congressional representation, but other than that...

Shire Nomad: Added a paragraph in the States section. If anyone wants to add territories I didn't think of, be my guest.

Faste Eddie: Reading back through this, I have no sense of the deep divide between the Left and the Right here in the States. You get me? The deepness of the divide. Like the two side do not share any common language.

Not really sure this is important enough to put in the article. Not really sure it wouldn't be interpreted as flame-bait.

Morgan Wick: In DC, you're dead-on accurate. However, there's a lot of controversy as to whether the divide, as portrated in the media, really is that deep in the country as a whole. Some say it's even deeper, some say it barely exists, some say most people are in the middle...

Zeke: I'd just like to say this is a terrific article. Informative, to the point, and incredibly free of flamebait considering the subject matter. Kudos to all involved.

arromdee: I added the "democracy" paragraph because I'm sick and tired of people on the net claiming that the US isn't a democracy because it's a republic instead. Anyone who can integrate it better, feel free to do so.

Gattsuru : Well, it's a representative republic with democratic elections of those representatives. Under most metrics, it's a fairly liberal democracy, too, given the limitations set in the US Constitution. America isn't a direct democracy to the same degree as Switzerland, but it's comparable to the vast majority of other liberal democracies in basis (if not more democratic — for example, we have elected Senators as opposed to Canada's appointed version and the American Senate has a more significant role in the election of SCOTUS judges). I guess someone from Switzerland calling it not a democracy would work, or some hard-core anarchists or federalist republicans, but it's hard to validate that sorta claim from most other modern nations.

Oh, and Lieberman isn't and hasn't been a moderate democrat. He voted for the war in Iraq, but that's about it — he's still got a similar ADA ratings as Hillary Clinton in the past, and even his most conservative ACU ratings are only in the sub-20 range.

Seven Seals: Now, I'm not American, but I'm fairly sure that "presidential elections are held every leap year" has got to be false. Surely that's "every four years"? The Y2K problem should have taught you by now that a leap year is more complicated than that...

Gattsuru: Y2k was more about the year 1999+1 than February 29th, 2000, but yes, the Constitution says that we get an Presidential election every four years.

Idle Dandy: Yes, but 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, but were presidential election years, so we should stay away from the "leap year" thing.

Fast Eddie: pulled ...

This theory was once tested between the years 1861 and 1865; some states believed that the federal government was interfering in matters that only the individual states should handle. These matters largely concerned the ownership of black people by white people. One group in the North kicked the ass of government into gear to stop this practice and one in the South kicked it out (formed a new nation, in fact) to protect it. This was a long, blood spattered lesson about how difficult it is to reconcile self-interest with group-interest. The Aesop: The people can be boneheads, too.

Novium: I think the republic/democracy bit should be pulled, as it's just begging to get into semantics, since both terms are vague and have meanings that have shifted quite a bit over the millenia. For example, it is quite correct to say that the US is not a democracy, if you're thinking of the original definition of democracy (e.g. classical athens). And "res publica" is a vague term...bu republic is sometimes not.

Nornagest: Pulled the following —

The most far-edge left-leaning liberal in standard political circles in the U.S. would still be considerably more "conservative" than liberals in Europe.

...which is only true for certain definitions of "liberals in Europe", and is certainly not true for most European "Liberal Parties".

And this —

All this is one reason why, despite the claims made at the top of this page, some people still insist on saying the United States is not a democracy but a republic. We just want to make clear that Presidential elections are not generally decided by a pure majority vote, although pretty much every other election (Congressmen, Senators, governors, mayors, etc.) does work that way.

...because it's (a) an obnoxious semantic argument, and (b) factually wrong. The executive branch of the United States government is democratically elected; it is not directly elected. I'm tempted to yank the republic-vs.-democracy discussion entirely, but I have a nasty feeling that things like this would just pop up again.

Also made a few clarifying edits and removed a Take That or two against the Republican party. Guys, I voted for Obama too, but let's try to be civilized about this.

Mr. Blank: Thomas Jefferson never said that quote which you attribute to him. If any of the founding fathers believed in democracy, it was Jefferson.

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