Shadow Minister,
If that cow isn't moving to greener pastures soon she'll go mad.

>>conservatives focused on growing the cow and keeping it free of the parasites>>

Do they?

That's certainly what conservatives claim and, until recently, I think there was an element of truth to it. Just an element mind. But it was there.

Then came the bail out of the so-called "to big to fail" banks. Except that they weren't really banks anymore. They were racketeer infiltrated criminal organisations (RICOs).

The essence of capitalism is occasional culls. When they happen they are painful but they clear the way for future growth.

What happened in this case is that the RICOs, disguised as banks, co-opted the socialists so that the criminals disguised as bankers who took them over could continue skimming.

So we don't really have conservatives any more - at least not in the sense that you and I have understood the word. We have two strands of socialists both intent on taking from the needy to give to the greedy.

Call it the dooH niboR principle.

I like the second FantasyLand you created. Can I live there? Will there be streams of chocolate?

An entirely pointless "question".

The fact that it is founded on an article in Scientific American adds a layer of pseudo-sophistication on a profoundly insubstantial opinion piece. The "once upon a time" preamble becomes irrelevant when the final sentences in each paragraph ask you to choose between "now conservatives want to turn back the clock in the name of greed and God" and "then liberals came along and destroyed everything in the name of 'progress' and utopian social engineering."

I've no idea why Scientific American considered it worthy of publication, since it is neither Scientific nor American.

Another five minutes wasted. Pah.

I agree with R0bert, rechtub and others.
The right answer lies in the middle.
I would go further and say that this is precisely the kind of polarisation of views that is destroying the US political system ans would destroy ours if we let it.
It has long been the ploy of lazy, visionless, polticians to create straw man arguments, by inventing an enemy.
And stirring up class warfare is a great way to create an enemy; one that doesn't really exist.
Australia's strength has always been that, to the extent that one can generalise, we are a pragmatic culture, that usually looks for a solution somewhere in the middle.
We get that extremists are always dangerous and almost always wrong.
And thank goodness for that, I say.
Anthony
http://www.observationpoint.com.au

Pericles

Actually I agree with you that these are not sensible questions.

The trouble is that a lot of the political rhetoric we see in the US and, to a lesser extent in Australia, really does seem to have one or other of these two narratives as a backdrop.

Many so-called "conservatives" do seem to be saying "everything was great until you socialists came and messed things up."

Many so-called progressives do seem to be saying "you Facists want to take us back to the dark ages."

What passes for political debate has degenerated into name-calling.