Esquerda e Direita

Sobre a sedução que o "monstro do capitalismo selvagem" e a "direita conservadora" (adoro estas expressões) fazem ao modelo social europeu.
Estou no país certo (para quem ainda tinha dúvidas)...

The government has bravely introduced a gradual increase in the retirement age (to 67), but it has been less bold in restructuring the health system, which threatens to gobble up an ever rising share of GDP at the expense of investment in education and infrastructure. It has no plans to tackle the network of regulations that makes it expensive to fire workers, and thus risky to hire them. A second instalment of Germany's federal redesign, which would limit states' debts but allow them to raise (or lower) taxes, may just squeak through.

In place of reform, the coalition offers comforting but vague promises. There will be help for the working poor in higher child benefits and subsidies to childless households. The number of school drop-outs will be cut by half by 2010. A bonus will be paid to firms that train more people than average. Workers in soon-to-be-liberalised postal services will get a minimum wage (which the SPD would like to extend across the economy). The government may help states to finance more crèches for children; it has mooted the idea of ten days' paid leave for workers to arrange nursing for sick parents. Such benevolence carries “clear social-democratic handwriting”, boasts the vice-chancellor (and labour minister), Franz Müntefering.


E ainda sobre a mesma discussão:

...At times it has seemed as if the Democrats (oddly, given their status as the less Godly party) have had to rely on divine intervention to get elected. Watergate helped Jimmy Carter in 1976, just as the end of the cold war and Ross Perot's disruptive third-party campaign helped Bill Clinton in 1992. Better organised and more intellectually inventive than their “liberal” rivals, American conservatives have controlled the agenda even when they have lost: Mr Clinton is best remembered for balancing the budget and passing welfare reform, both conservative achievements. In a country where one in three people see themselves as conservatives (against one in five as liberals) and where the South and West have grown far more quickly than the liberal north-east, it is easy to see why Mr Bush and his strategist, Karl Rove, dreamed of banishing Democrats from power for a generation...
The easy scapegoat is Mr Bush himself. During his presidency, the words Katrina, Rumsfeld, Abramoff, Guantánamo and Libby have become shorthand for incompetence, cronyism or extremism...
...Yet this President Bush is not a good scapegoat. Rather than betraying the right, he has given it virtually everything it craved, from humongous tax cuts to conservative judges...
...One finding that stands out in the polls is that most Americans distrust government strongly. Forty years ago they turned against a leftish elite trying to boss them around; now they have had to endure a right-wing version. In democracies political revolutions usually become obvious only in retrospect. In 1968, with America stuck in another bruising war, few liberals saw Richard Nixon's southern strategy as part of a long-term turn to the right. All that was clear then was that most Americans urgently wanted a change of direction. That is also true today.

...The Republican Party is only the most visible part of the American right. The right's hidden strength lies in its conservative base. America is almost unique in possessing a vibrant conservative movement. Every state boasts organisations fighting in favour of guns and against taxes and abortion. The Christian right can call upon megachurches and Evangelical colleges. Conservatives have also created a formidable counter-establishment of think-tanks and pressure groups.
And many Americans who are not members of the movement happily embrace the label “conservative”. They think of themselves as God-fearing patriots who dislike big government and are tough on crime and national security. In 2004 roughly a third of the voters identified themselves as conservatives; just over 20% identified themselves as “liberal” (as American left-wingers are somewhat strangely called). Conservatives have driven the policy debate on everything from crime to welfare to foreign policy...

From The Economist print edition
(Não vá alguém do PSD sentir-se inspirado)