Let's just come out and admit it: America has no liberal, progressive party. In any other country, the Democrats would be considered right-wing

"One problem with American politics is that the unions were aggressively depoliticized during the Red Scare / HUAC / McCarthyism of the 1940s and '50s. Labour unions were completely purged of communist, socialist, and even social democratic elements, who were blacklisted, jailed, deported, or otherwise marginalized.

What was left after the purge was a union movement that had learned the hard lessons of a paranoid, right-wing government: negotiate on behalf of your members for better working conditions, but don't even think of trying to influence politics.

While other countries developed labour-based political parties that had the resources to pull the political centre of gravity to the left and openly demanded broadly progressive social policies (like higher minimum wages, universal health care, liberal morality laws, and less aggressive foreign policies), the US was left with two parties, both financed by sectors of big business, with superficially different but substantially equivalent values and policies.

Another problem with American politics is the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. FPTP is designed to give disproportionate weight to mainstream parties and to marginalize and under-represent alternative parties. Those few countries that still practice FPTP have more conservative governments and lower rates of voter participation - voters know that a vote for a progressive party is essentially wasted.

If the US followed most of the rest of the industrialized world and adopted some form of proportional representation, it would be easier for third parties representing real alternatives to attract votes.

A third problem with American politics is that the corporate newsmedia serve the same interests as the two corporate parties, and use relentless propaganda to perpetuate the current system. One element of this is for the two parties to pretend they are dramatically different. For example, both parties have a vested interest in pretending that the Democrats are left-wing. Thus we see surreal artifacts like the conservative corporatist Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) on a t-shirt with the text "RE-DEFEAT COMMUNISM".

The practical upshot is that many policies that other countries simply take for granted are not "politically realistic" in the US, which means the sectors of big business that form policy in the two parties do not support them. Further, the government essentially serves as an adjunct of corporate power, funneling hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to big business via the Pentagon system, energy subsidies, agri-business subsidies, the War on Drugs and prison-industrial complex, aggressive deregulation of the teleco