Sydney (with a Digression into Comparative Politics)

Spend a few days in Sydney, as I have, and you will convince yourself to move here.  The climate is more than agreeable, the people are friendly, and life is good.  After landing around 6:30 AM, I checked into my hotel and then headed out to explore the city, eventually making my way to Bondi Beach.  Bondi is like the Wrigley Field of beaches – lots of people are there for the scene more than the main event, but the people watching is notable.  I was probably the most pale person there, but that didn’t stop me from spending a little time working on a November tan.

Over the next couple of days, I toured some historic sites and museums, and hiked in the Blue Mountains.  None of that was blog-worthy, however.  My story from Sydney has to do with something else.

If this place were Cheers, I would be like Norm.

For lunch on Day # 2, I stopped at the 2^nd oldest pub in Sydney, The Hero of Waterloo (obviously, that would be the Duke of Wellington, not Waterloo, Iowa native Michelle Bachmann).  Famously, the Hero of Waterloo has a trap door that was put to use on particularly belligerent clientele back in the day.  Anyway, there were only 2 other patrons and the bartender in there when I strolled in.

My American accent gave me away, and I quickly became a popular customer.  Aussies love Americans as much as Americans love Aussies.  They wanted to know why I was there, what I did, what I thought about this, that, and the other thing.  And I was happy to pontificate.  It became a much longer lunch than I was expecting.  One of the other patrons paid for my second round.  We’ll call him Paul.  He was the perfect example of the kind of person I meet pretty often abroad: someone who considers themselves a political conservative in their own nation’s politics, but yet thinks American politics are way off to the right.

Paul is a supporter of Australia’s current conservative prime minister, who is a climate change denier, and is such a devotee of all things American that when I said I was from Iowa, he immediately referenced the TV show American Pickers.  Paul also was a charter subscriber to Sarah Palin TV.  I had to go halfway around the world to find someone who actually subscribes to that.

Anyway, despite all of that, Paul proclaimed himself to be a fan of Barack Obama and frightened by the Republican Party (still not sure why he subscribed to Sarah Palin TV, though he frankly admitted to being a bit smitten).  This is just example # 327 of how the left/right spectrum in the US is several clicks to the right of most other nations.  David Cameron, Bibi Netanyahu, Angela Merkel, and maybe Australia’s Tony Abbott and Canada’s Stephen Harper are all right-of center heads of government that could not get nominated to be dogcatcher by the Republican Party of Burlington, Vermont simply because they support a social safety net that includes universal health care.  Thus, they must be Socialists.

If the Republicans are even aware of just how far to the right they have moved, vis a vis their fellow conservatives across the Western world, they may not care.  To them, it may just confirm that they’re right.  And certainly, just because the rest of the world is doing something, doesn’t mean the world is right.  But when people like Paul find the Republican Party “frightening,” you know American politics are simply like nothing else in the world.