How much do you know about Republican and Democrat ideologies?

You mentioned Liberals (or Democrats) being called Socialists. I actually saw a few posts in my Facebook wall about somebody trying to raise an alarm by saying that Obama is a Socialist because he supported more government involvement in a lot of things. I find this strange because it is suppose to be common knowledge that Democrats believe that government has a role to play in the lives of American citizens. It is not a stigma for them. It is actually a virtue. It is part of their ideology. What I find surprising is the fact that those who oppose this Democrat/Liberal ideology thinks they can somehow eradicate this belief. Given that American politics is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, I'm doubtful it will happen in a thousand years.

I'll post here on this, although the issues I am addressing appear in later posts as well. There are underlying ideologies, but I don't believe that ideologies can be accurately apportioned to the current political parties. I will use Australia as an example because that is what I am most familiar with. I see that currently there are four basic ideological packages which can be named Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism, and Green Radicalism. In Australia these are split like this: The Liberal/National Party Coalition (LNP) is primarily a conservative party, extremely so on the whole, and defined roughly as both socially and fiscally conservative (almost reactionary in its current form), but it contains a number of people who would really best fall under the conservative Liberal flag, as the whole party once did, which can be roughly defined as socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The Labor Party is nominally Socialist, but in practical terms at the moment contains mostly socially left liberal and fiscally conservative politicians, with a remnant of actual socialists and left-wing unionists. The Greens are both socially and fiscally radical. If we bunched these parties according to their actual ideologies, we would have, at an estimate, about 40% liberals, 30% conservatives, 20% socialists, and 10% radical Greens. But the actual practical politics forces the socialists to bow down to the liberal left, and the right liberals to bow down to the conservatives within their respective parties. This leads to a large degree of confusion between the ideologies and the practical political platforms, and also points to considerable internal dissension within the major parties. I'm sure individuals have similar mixes of belief: I, for instance, would sum up my personal ideology as 35% Liberal, 35% Green Radical, 20% Socialist, and 10% Conservative. From outside it seems to me that the two major US parties are similarly split between Liberal, Liberal Conservative, and Hard Right Conservative. This leads to the same sort of internal debate within the two major parties, although it would seem that this is more obvious among the Republicans. Romney would appear to be a Liberal Conservative who is not at all liked by the hard right supporters of the Republican party. I'm sure some of our American friends will disagree with this analysis, and I'm open to conviction on that estimate. I do find the lack of Socialist and Radical Green ideologies in any strength in US politics as disturbing, but I'm sure they exist at third party and independent levels, it's just that the US system doesn't appear to allow them the same opportunity of political representation as does the Australian system. Lash