Swings ... roundabouts.
We have more parties, but our elected representatives are much more obliged to toe the party line.
That was the impression I had.
No. If any US politician stood up and argued for the policies that the UK Conservative Party supports, your hate-radio people would denounce him as a Communist.
Yeah, like I said, unless I edited it out, some kind of odd beliefs for conservatives compared to some of the jackbooted thugs we get over here.
No, they used to be socialists. They are now much more middle-of-the-road, i.e. they are far to the left of anything that Americans would describe as "liberal", i.e. they are rational pragmatic moderates.
The Conservatives are "liberal", in American terms.
Well, I dunno if I'm as far left as your Labour party, but I generally score in the high negatives (-6,-6 or so) on both axes of the Political Compass. I'm pretty far left economically, and pretty libertarian (and I don't mean Libertarian, they're anarcho-capitalists, I tend very far left from them, and more libertarian). The Democratic party in the US is well right of center, and the Republican a fair bit farther; both of them are pretty authoritarian.
My old man is a frank socialist; socialize the banks, the food mills, insurance, telecommunications, medicine, and energy. Too authoritarian for me. I suppose I'm an anarcho-syndicalist if you have to put a name on it, but I don't expect anyone over here is going to accept that little authority anytime soon; makes them feel insecure. The only ones who espouse anything like it haven't figured out that money is power yet, or if they have, it's their security blanket so they don't have to face up to what it means to actually not care what other people do if it doesn't affect you. US citizens are
meddlesome. Always sticking their noses in other peoples' business.
In your country, Tony Blair wouldn't have won an election if he was running for dogcatcher.
I'm sure.
If your head is now spinning, it ought to be. Heaven knows I'm pro-American, but really ...
No, I've talked with Brits before. I know the score, some. I just take everything about 5 or 6 points left, and equate from there, and don't look at the actual exact positions on social issues too closely; it gets me pretty close to the feel of it. If I need to know more, I ask; you folks have some odd (from the viewpoint of the system over here, not my personal one) ideas about things, and because we speak the same language it can be very deceptive. There's an annoying tendency to assume you know what someone is saying, which is not always the case.
I think I got it already, stop me if I'm wrong. The Governor is to the state what the President is to the country. Am I right?
Pretty much; it varies from state to state to a certain extent, but most if not all states duplicate the general idea of three branches, executive, legislative, judicial, and have checks and balances between them. How the legislature is set up varies greatly, and whether state judges and sometimes law enforcement are elected or appointed varies, and even whether they technically report to the judicial or executive; some states have income tax, some don't, some have sales tax, some don't, and each one has its own constitution-thing (they're not all called a constitution) and its own set of laws. Some states have land that's owned by the federal government, mostly out West, and on that land, the only law is usually the US Code; state law generally doesn't apply there. But that too varies; each one is a special case, though many of them have identical laws. All of the laws in all of the states, and all of their constitution-things all have to conform to the US Constitution, but a state can make a law that contravenes the US Code and the federal government can run into trouble enforcing it because they don't have the manpower to do so without the cooperation of the authorities in the state. They can get all high-handed about it, and sometimes they do- marijuana laws are that way recently- but there's no mechanism to make state law conform to the US Code.
It's complicated.
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