>The US is a very conservative country
>- meaning that a rather sizeable part of the population believes in
>conservative ideas - from religious fundamentalism, to sucking up to
>powers that be, to the hatred of unpopular minority groups.
Yes, but... The U.S. is hardly monolithic. Yeah, 30-40% of the electorate may be right-leaning evangelical Christian, but that still means that 60-70% isn't. Your time in this country has largely - entirely? - been during a period of conservative dominance at the higher levels of the state and the ISA, but a large part of the pop is alienated from that. You're also essentializing the results of a process I talked about earlier - the spread of right-wing ideas, once seen as extreme, into the mainstream. There's no reason we couldn't do the same. Liberalism once seemed impregnably dominant too; remember Buckley's manifesto for National Review fifty years ago, and his demand for history to "Stop!" He wanted history to stop because he thought it was trending inexorably leftward. Jeremy Rifkin reported a poll of Harvard Business Review readers in the late 1970s (which should be fact-checked, since Rifkin is a bit sloppy) that found most thinking that capitalism was doomed. If only, eh?
Doug