A great paragraph today from Matthew Ygelsias:

…what makes America weird isn’t that we have a conservative political party (they have ‘em everywhere) or that the conservative political party succeeds at winning elections (happens in England, Canada, France, Italy, etc. all the time) but that the conservative political party is so unreconciled to the modern welfare state. That’s what’s weird. It isn’t true of major political parties outside the United States, and for a while it wasn’t true of the United States either.

In a post critiquing David Kennedy’s review of Paul Krugman’s new book.