George W. Bush was never hard-right. For that matter, Trump isn't hard-right either. GW was pretty centrist all around (as far as US politics is concerned) and Trump is a right-leaning populist, which is kind of a weird position.
I've leaned pretty libertarian most of my life... I have conservative friends and pretty progressive friends (and those that I do NOT talk politics with).
A lot of this will come down to is definitely regional. A lot of the U.S. identity itself isn't the same, and different regions are very different. Texas itself is larger than like 80% of the countries in the world. The U.S. as a whole is massive. It's every bit as diverse in some ways as going anywhere in the E.U. despite mostly speaking the same language.
As to the U.S. and going left or right... it varies and depends. I think a lot of the left's "big tent" is falling, in that there is a very outspoken subset of the left that has shifted farther away from where most people are comfortable with. It's fractured, but there. There's also a bit of a yearning towards some more conservative values and a return to a stronger national identity. Both can be, and are true.
In my experience, most people in the US have a pretty live and let live pov... that of course stops to a large extend at coercion of children.
It is entirely irrelevant to whether the ideology is conservative and/or hard-right, since populism describes not the substance of policy or ideology but style of rhetorical framing in a way which is largely orthogonal to ideology.
I've leaned pretty libertarian most of my life... I have conservative friends and pretty progressive friends (and those that I do NOT talk politics with).
A lot of this will come down to is definitely regional. A lot of the U.S. identity itself isn't the same, and different regions are very different. Texas itself is larger than like 80% of the countries in the world. The U.S. as a whole is massive. It's every bit as diverse in some ways as going anywhere in the E.U. despite mostly speaking the same language.
As to the U.S. and going left or right... it varies and depends. I think a lot of the left's "big tent" is falling, in that there is a very outspoken subset of the left that has shifted farther away from where most people are comfortable with. It's fractured, but there. There's also a bit of a yearning towards some more conservative values and a return to a stronger national identity. Both can be, and are true.
In my experience, most people in the US have a pretty live and let live pov... that of course stops to a large extend at coercion of children.