The thing with American politics is that we're largely still arguing the same exact **** we were arguing about back in 1789 when we ratified our constitution. And because of that, our entire political system has essentially been worked around it.
The thing to remember is that the US was a nation of immigrants and one of the first to come into its own during the Age of Enlightenment. But where later revolutions were motivated and influenced by a great deal more thought and debate to the political philosophy (most notably Marx), we came into it relatively early in that process.
So because of that, the principles we were founded on have realistically left a severe issue with regards to ideas surrounding power of the people and power of the government. Essentially, we were founded as a small government system on a political philosophy that calls for a severe unequal distribution of power... but we were a republic (sort of - oligarchy, technically).
So essentially the entirety of our political debate since then has entailed figuring out how we determine the role of government, power of the people, and definitions of equality under that political philosophy. And our modern parties are essentially direct descendants of those original groups, with some significant exceptions.
That basic conflict has changed with the times, with industrialization, the rise of unionization, civil rights, etc. And the Democratic Party and the Republican Party essentially swapped core ideologies in the mid-20th Century due entirely to a significant change in the stance on social issues in the party, but that's essentially how it has gone down.
It's basically ALWAYS been defined by two characteristics: position on race, position on the power of the worker vs. the power of the industrialist.
Gender has been a hot-button issue at times, and topics related to abortion, marriage, rape, and divorce waxing and waning over the past two centuries.
And that's American politics in a nutshell.
Right now, it's social and economic liberals to the left, social and economic conservatives to the right. At other points, the social and conservative positions have been mismatched (Democratic-Republicans were the ones who owned the most Slaves, originally, but they LOVED them some small government heavy on state power).
someproteinguy wrote:
Well look at it this way, there only a very very small amount of the state that's actually coastline. The rest is all inland.
Besides, it's U.S. Geography, would anyone over there even know or care anyway?
The difference between American and world education systems is that other places learn about the world. We learn so little about everything from world history to geography.
Which is a shame, because the vast majority of Americans have no reason to care about where North Dakota is, but a hell of a lot of reason to know the basic geography of Eastern Asia.