You make Australia sound like the sort of place I would like to move to, even though our side won the last election. Of course, Australia might not want people from that right-wing haven, the US. But I figure they owe us big time for taking Rupert Murdoch off their hands. Australia could admit 10,000 like me, and still be in the red to the US in the tired refuse acceptance category.

As someone else said above, there was briefly a conservative “let’s move to Australia” meme. Or more accurately, there was a comic meme based on mocking some unfortunate conservative who had posted on Twitter or Facebook somewhere that she want to move to Australia because their President was a good, god fearing family man.
The mockery was based on the facts that (a) Australia doesn’t have a President, (b) the Prime Minister is a woman who is (b) living with a partner whilst unmarried, (c) doesn’t have children and (d) is an atheist.

No worries. Seeing as I come from the, umm, Global South myself, figured I could offer a bit of insight.

I don’t have a link at hand, but apparently there were some bloggers on the right who, in the wake of Obama’s reelection, thought that Israel would be the best place to escape the inexorable rise of decadent Kenyan-style socialist sharia. Obviously they had to know virtually nothing about Israeli domestic policies like universal health care — they just liked the idea of living in what they saw as a Spartan, hyper-militarized garrison state surrounded by scary Arabs.

Also, as Roy Edroso has amply documented in posts like this one, the right-wing version of “I’m moving to Canada” generally tends to involve some variant of “going Galt” or “going off the grid” within the US, rather than outside of it.

I wouldn’t be too sure about Costa Rica being some sort of libertarian paradise either.

I had a patient at the free clinic recently whose diabetes got out of control because he developed an inguinal hernia and couldn’t work any more. Since he was a landscaper and his work involved continuous exertion, that had kept his diabetes under control. After the hernia sprung up — no work, no control of diabetes.

I tried to get him to surgery in the US, but no dice. No way could he afford insurance on what he made, no way his employer was going to provide it, and no way could he wait 3 years without working for Medicare to kick in. Here in the US, we’re not smart enough to just give people the relatively cheap surgery they need to go back to work and become productive again, while they control their diabetes so they won’t end up on horrendously expensive dialysis some time after they reach Medicare age. But it turned out that El Salvador is that smart, and my patient just hopped on a plane back home and had his government-paid-for surgery within a week.

The libertarian paradises are an endangered species. When even El Salvador has gone Communist, can we count on Costa Rica to stand firm against sense and reason? I wouldn’t trust even Somalia. Sure, they don’t have a nanny state now — but that’s because they don’t have any state now. The second domestic peace breaks out there, the second any sort of government takes hold, I bet we’ll start seeing publicly funded hernia surgeries within days. That’s how socialist things have gotten outside the US.

Fortunately, we do stand firm here in the US. I would expect any day now to see attempts by socialist foreign countries to send relief teams to the US to give our poor people free hernia surgeries, were I not able to rely on our political system to fight off that threat. For now, our poor still have to board planes to fly back to El Salvador, should they be fortunate enough to be from there, to get basic care, because we have a Senate fully aware of the creeping threat posed by treaties on the care of the disabled, and ready to stand up and be counted on the side of our inalienable right to mistreat the sick, dammit.

Oh, I know, some people point to the examples of Golden Dawn and what’s going on in Hungary, looking for hopeful signs that some countries, after years of wandering in the wastelands of socialism, are returning to the common heritage of stupidity that we never lost here in the US. But I will never trust the likes of Jobbik or the Golden Dawn people, folks who had to struggle to overturn sense and reason in their countries, to remain half so immovably loyal to stupid as someone like DeMint. The revolutionary types have had to cultivate a certain rational oversight of at least means, if not ends. But the two tend to bleed into each other, to the point that we can only securely trust stupidity when it has always remained a cloistered virtue. DeMint I trust to remain always where he is, firmly fixed in the stupid, because he has never had to deal with anything else. It’s people like DeMint who get the job done day in and day out for stupid, and we shouldn’t deny them their due to go off admiring the flashy, but unreliable, work of folks like Golden Dawn. No one does stupid like the US, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.

” Sorry Barry, but the GOP is not walking around beating up immigrants, or calling for the investigation of Jews as security risks. That’s happening right now in Europe. Jobbik and the Golden Dawn are far more right wing then all but the craziest fringes of the Republican party. Unless Hungary and Greece aren’t OCED countries anymore, that comment was just wrong.”

And the EU is leaning hard on Hungary for just those reasons. Greece, of course, is a country being crushed by outside forces, which is in extreme crisis.

“Think about it this way. A Liberal in America says, “If McCain/Romney/Whoever wins, I’m moving to Canada/France/Australia!” A Conservative says, “If Obama wins, I’m moving to ???” What free, Democratic country is more rightwing than America? None, because no “Conservative” party is more rightwing than the Americans.”

Just before the election I saw a commenter on a conservative/libertarian blog say that if Obama won he was going to move to Costa Rica or Australia. The Costa Rica part I can sort of understand, but Australia? What do these people think other countries are like?

Here’s a post about Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of LA: http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003644.html

It would appear that most Republican policy prescriptions can be embraced by these races.

How about: rich brown people in brown-majority countries have been known to support to parties with explicit neo-liberal agendas (e.g.). This is certainly true, undeniably so, but note that we’re almost certainly going to be talking about states with very high levels of quite entrenched socio-economic inequalities. So it’s not exactly “these races” that the parties in question are being embraced by. Or perhaps you have in mind something like: large majorities in Catholic-dominated brown-majority countries can and do support parties with anti-reproductive rights agendas. Undeniably true once again. But, and this leads me to my next point:

There’s really no obvious way to map the left-right axis (or maybe the centrist-Teh Crazy axis) as it exists in the contemporary US onto most of the developing world or Global South, etc. Obviously, you can pick isolated bits of the Republican platform and show them to be popular in particular developing countries or within particular segments of the population within such countries. Actually finding a party that maps on to the Republican party as a whole might turn out to be a taller order.

This though is not because, as Rich B. seems to think, right-wing parties in the developing world map on to the Democratic party. Right-wing parties in the developing world come in all sorts of stripes. (At least in part because there’re often so many to choose from, even within one country!) So, e.g., they can be hard-line nationalist, or getting into quasi-fascist territory, with economic policy a secondary concern at best. They might be regionalist, proto-separatist party with a set of concerns that doesn’t generalize in any obvious way (not that all such parties are right-wing obviously, but they can be). Or of course they might be a center-right neoliberal party. Etc.

(Sorry if this is a bit off topic. Also wanted to say I quite enjoyed the Aesop interlude above.)

Of course not. Outside of Europe and North America all nations belong to an Esperanto speaking federation dedicated to human rights and bagpipe music (when those do not conflict).