[WS:] It is a good point. I do agree that it is ultimately the power relations on the ground rather than legal formalities that matters. It ultimately comes down to how many divisions the pope has. The absence of a labor party is probably *the* most important factor explaining US conservatism. This can be demonstrated by comparing the US to, say, New Zealand. Both are former British colonies that adopted, for the most part, the British common law framework. Both face ethnic divisions. However, NZ has a strong Labour party since the beginning of the 20th century while the US does not. Consequently, NZ has fairly progressive (relatively speaking) politics and a decent social safety net, whereas the US does not.
Bill: "Which is the influence of public opinion."
[WS:] True, but public opinion does not exist in a vacuum either. Nor is it encoded in genes. It is shaped by institutions - political parties, government policies, media, religion. So while the powers that be must take public opinion at any given moment - they also have the capacity of shaping that opinion in a longer run. So we need to look into the institutional framework after all to explain US conservatism.
The absence of a Labor party in the US can explain quite a bit, but it itself begs the question - why such a party has not been established here?
My own hypothesis is - in a nutshell - that democracy came to the US too soon. The US considerably expanded suffrage to virtually all white males way before any other country did. This institutional development was unprecedented in history and that lack of precedence had profound consequences for setting the institutional path of development. Contrary to neoliberal pretensions, humans are not innovators but followers and imitators. They follow and imitate even when they innovate, as the Old Man aptly observed in the opening to his "18th brumaire." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
Absent prior institutional models for democracy - the US borrowed a hodge podge of institutional solutions - mainly from religion and business,although some argue that Native Americans also provided models. This, in turn set the institutional path of development in which religious sectarianism and business organizations played the central role.
The nearly universal white male suffrage in the US but not elsewhere had another important consequences later on in the second half of the 19th century. It split labor organizing along gender (and also race) lines - as Theda Skocpol argues in her "Social policy in the United States." That means that male organizations centered around local political machines tied to political parties and businesses, which were crucial in the dispensation of political patronage. That tied the interests of large segments of the working class to the existing political machines. On the other hand, women's organizations were left out of the political machine structures, but they also strive to achieve different goals than patronage dispensation - suffrage rights and social protection. That again tied women of different social class background together, which further diluted class-based organizing. Skocpol argues that, in contrast to the US, the limited suffrage in Europe that coincided mainly with class divisions were central in the fusion of economic and political goals of labor organizing and eventually led to different policy outcomes.
I think that history, or rather path dependence, matters quite a bit and can shed some light why the US does not have a labor party like most other industrialized countries do.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."