Meanwhile in america...

Liberals are idealists. Doesn't matter if an idea works or kills millions. As long as it sounds poetic and righteous then they really dont care if it is effective.

Conservatives are quite the opposite. They care more about the end results than how good it sounds on paper. Their problem however is a complete inability to understand the data or interpret it objectively. No matter what the data actually says in their mind it always agrees with them.

@freemo several years ago when it was first revealed that a lot of expensive tennis shoes were made by children in sweatshop conditions, a prominent right wing newspaper columnist wrote that o6f they'd known of this when buying their most recent shoes of this sort, they would have bought two pairs.
They went on to explain a grand theory about how child labor was good actually because of economic growth and a grand theory of development and a lot of ideas about things getting better in the long term.
What's confusing about America is that there's no mainstream left. What you're describing are two forms of being very far right.

@celesteh Though to be fair most of the world rarely uses classic left to mean left either, everywhere uses some variation of neo-liberal usually specific to their own local definition of left and right. More often than not they use left to mean socialism in some form, rather than its classical definition which is in many ways contrary to this.

@freemo neo-liberals come from the chicago school of economics. They supported Pinochet. This is not left in any sense.

The parties in the US are organisations designed to advance the power of their elected members. They are not ideological. The US parties do have platforms and right now these are Tory vs Fascist. While one party is definitely to the left of the other, it's not even centre-right in historical terms. It's just right wing - even by the standards of the US over the last 50 years.  Some important nods to individual liberties confuse things slightly, but taking a wider historical view, it's kind of a Whig position, which is very much about protecting powers of the owning classes.

@celesteh I'm not talking parties, I think it is obvious to many that the democratic party often has candidates who are neither neo-liberal or classical liberal.

I am talking about people, and there is no shortage of the left in america, by that i mean "Supporting a government whose focus is taxation aimed at wealth distribution as well as a high reliance on government regulation" which tends to be descriptive of the left in most ountries including the US.

While in and of itself this isnt always a devestating decision in america it is applied with a toddler level of understanding that makes it nearly impossible to succeed. One day with more education perhaps the left and right in america might make sense, be regardless left and right does apply.

@freemo Your definition of 'neo-liberal' is so far off from how the term is used in most English-language discourse that I'm afraid we can't can't discuss further as we're talking at cross-purposes.

@celesteh Correct I am using the definition most of the world uses in general conversation, not a technical term (also the definition provided by wikipedia).

@freemo You're talking about the post war consensus. Neoliberalism is the system that came after that, as promoted by Thatcher and Reagan.

@celesteh I am refering to what is generally meant by "left" specifically the definition provided by wikipedia, to quote:

The term left-wing can also refer to "the radical, reforming, or **socialist** section of a political party or system".

@freemo .... if wikipedia says that reagan and thatcher were left wing, you may want to take that with a tiny grain of salt

@celesteh The specific definition isnt particularly important for the assertion I was making which really just boils down to which of the two groups a person identifies as being in. Which in turns dictates the sort of people they are around and the habits they pick up.