I just wanted to offer one little quip: You know you are in the U.S.A. when someone refers to the Democratic Party as “left.” I can’t think of anywhere else in the world where that might fly, except maybe for Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Anthropologists often spend time with the marginalized, and tend to empathize with them, which means in our society they are “leftists” (but in Soviet Russia they would have been rightists). Wall Street types tend to spend time with each other, and believe that they are doing something pretty useful and interesting, too, and in our society such people tend to be Republican. This is why they support bail-outs of agencies like Fannie Mae and Bear Stearns even though such policies run counter to free market principles.

One of the disadvantages of a volunteer military is that only people who believe in the pre-existing world view of the military tend to volunteer, and today the people are already there are Repubilcans, even though the manner in which health care, PX privileges, etc., are distributed in the military is usually with respect to need, not “productivity.” In other words, in the military, many of the benefits are socialized across the institution–privates and generals all shop at the same PX, and get the same medical treatment (It is a a bit like France…).

The irony is that in the US you get a lot of right wing Republicans supporting socialist policies for the military, and bailouts for Wall Street.

Bottom line: party affiliation does not predict very well which party you support–we are all leftists when it comes to our own group, but rightists when it comes to the other guy. Rather, which party you belong to depends on who you work and associate with.