Trump is now president.

[Baginns Hobbiton]

That's why Elizabeth Warren was so desperate to prove her Native American heritage. She needed something to use.

I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with trying to silence the attacks she was getting on it from the right. Maybe she just didn't want the distraction of constantly being called "Pocahontas" during her 2020 bid.

[Kulaf]

I'm sure that was part of it since she built up quite the repertoire of interviews claiming hardship growing up because of her mixed heritage, so I think that left her open to ridicule unless she could prove it. This just made it worse.

[Kulaf]

Nom, nom, nom....

https://youtu.be/-qSodCrb6KQ

[Ddrak]

That is because most Parliamentary styles of government allow "radical" ideologies to flourish and have a party. Anytime things get out of control, they dissolve and start over. The US system is not designed in that fashion. It is a more deliberate process and the two houses of Congress are required to find common ground to pass legislation. This leads to more homogenous thinking on the majority of issues and only taking stands are certain others.

I am not required to live in a city. I am not required to drive a car. I am not required to vote. In fact, there is very little in the US that you are required to do, including paying taxes if you choose subsistence living. That's kind of the point......individual freedom and choice. If you want to engage in certain activities, then you as an individual freely consent to do so and to live according to that choice.

Intersectionality is about victimization. People define themselves as whatever group makes the most sense for whatever argument they are having. I have seen white guys in a debate to another white guy say that the other white guys opinion doesn't matter...…..because he's a white guy.

It's utterly insane.

There's not a significant difference in the processes in most Western governments that you describe. They typically follow a lower/upper house system where you have a different gerrymander on each house (tending individual in the lower and geographical in the upper), which requires bills to be confirmed in each house to pass and be signed by some head of state. If anything, it's the voting method that locks in the two party system in the US more than anything else, in my view.

Speaking more specifically on the comparison between Aussie and US, things I see:

US politicians are far more likely to vote against their parties than Aussie. Over here, the party leaders typically force party-line votes where things are getting tight. I prefer the US.
US bills tend towards big omnibus monstrosities that carry a ton of pork to get passage. Over here, the upper house can partially pass lower house bills - essentially a line-item veto in the Senate. Tends to make a significant streamlining of legislation.
Mandatory voting over here, along with Saturday elections skews politics left but also changes elections to fighting for the center rather than the base. Fringe parties then rise on the extremes, which become a problem in a close or minority government. I like mandatory voting.
The effective head of state here (Governer General) never vetoes a bill. They can, theoretically, but it would be suicide and result in a constitutional crisis where the PM and Gov. General try to mutually dismiss each other. I definitely prefer the apolitical head of state, but it's more by good will than structure that it's working.
Question time is both stupid and awesome. I have nothing more to add.

I really don't see anything more "deliberate" or "homogenous" in the US, in fact I see it as a race to the extremes of viable policy at the moment. Probably more from politicians degenerating from statesmen to, well, politicians (and that's not just the US).

In that same vein, I really didn't notice people being more "free" in the US than other western nations, in any pragmatic sense. Where you gain on legal freedom you lose on economic or other senses of freedom. Like I said before, it's just collective agreements on where the different societies want to work together for their own betterment. Someone still builds the roads, enforces laws, educates people, defends the nation and all the other functions that have proven over time to work better collectively than individually, and those still need to be paid for collectively. I think pulling out "socialism" as an evil is daft when so much of every Western nation, including and especially the US, is built on collective works in balance with individual opportunity.

Dd