[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by peter12

Haha, I'm not even going to touch the meat of this post but I will say that this fell into my earlier point. Politics, especially in the United States but also in the broaden Western World, is dominated by the axiom of right vs. left or by the labels of liberal vs. socialists. Within the liberal camp are really the classical liberals and some sort of Rawlsian liberal, but both share the basic assumptions regarding politics and human life. Philosophically, they just believe in very slightly different things.

What I find more interesting is the slowly ebbing and flickering light of Burkean inspired antiquarianism which is, of course, still very strong in Britain, but also has roots in America through the work of Russell Kirk to revive Burke's thinking. Now I don't think Burke was a philosopher per se, but he is, along with De Maistre and Tocqueville, one of the few non-Romantic skeptics of liberalism to come out of the modern age.

This is derived from the aristocratic or patrician way of life which is now totally defunct in America and thus, has very little sway in American political debates.

I don't know what my point is...

I think we basically agree, if we say this:
1. Right and left are meaningless in the U.S. It's an easy shorthand that isn't all that descriptive of their political tradition, which has actually oscillated between populism and anti-populism, which the astute reader will notice are not actually ideologies at all but styles of rhetoric.
2. All mainstream political thinkers in the U.S. are liberal. There are nut-jobs (Green-party hippies, 9/11 conspiracy theorists and tea-party types) who are still liberals but don't realize it--and they ratchet up their rhetoric to account for their profound feeling of disenchantment with the polity.