Public Opinion Data Says America is Really Center-Left

America is as far right-wing on the planet as you can get. Even our liberal would be right wingers in all other countries. What a clown-ass study.

You say that "America" is extremely right-wing. Are you referring to America's leaders, America's media, America's people, or what? Just baldly stating that "America" is this or that is painting with way too broad a brush!

This article clearly demonstrates that the American people are center-left, whereas their leaders and media lean to the right. Do you disagree?

The contrast between the extensive analysis and insight in the article and your rather simple-minded "rebuttal" is striking.

they are not getting the votes.

if we had politicians and media who actually talked about progressive ideas.

...over-the-fucking-fence-right. When do we get actual representation around here?

Resulting in acute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness">learned helplessness.

Blaming them is more rationalization than reason.

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of constantly complaining about it?

Do tell.

That's a quote from a friend of mine. It's also an easily observed truth where I live. I am surrounded by Republicans who are by and large socially liberal, but not willing to vote Democratic. They appear to honestly believe that the Republican Party is the party of lower taxes, smaller government, and strong national security. They will quickly admit that George W Bush (nor any living Republican politician) will not be remembered for those things, with the possible exception of national security. They also want to be left alone as much as possible, but they want code enforcement to keep people from running down the neighborhood, and they want the police to contain the criminal element.

They vote for a mythical GOP. Their priorities are different. They by and large don't care about gay rights, it's not going to bother them much if Florida has gay marriage, but they aren't going to vote for it. They are hinkey on health care, because most of them have it through employers or retirement, but they can see how it would help small business if everyone could get it cheaply. They just don't want to be the only ones paying for it.

Like I said, they vote for a mythical GOP, the party of lower taxes and smaller government but I don't think any of them have a reason to associate those things with the GOP. It doesn't interrupt the myth though, in their minds, there was a time when taxes were low and government was sufficiently small. My guess would be sometime about 1780 but few of these people were alive then.

Now out in Central Florida, inner Florida, in the gutter that runs from Georgia to the Everglades reside the GOP we all love to hate. These are the dumb assed too stupid to get out of their own way GOP. These are the people who pass town ordinances banning Satan, who don't care if their adult children don't have health care because Single Payer is socialism, the people who see the face of the Devil in the smoke above New York and the face of Jesus in an oil stain on the driveway.

In my town, there's an upper to upper-middle class strata that owns a lot of the businesses, top professional & administrative jobs, runs the city/county gov't & charitable orgs, etc. They belong to the same clubs & have interlocking points where their opinions influence each other.

For example, the national Chamber of Commerce influences the state ones, state ones influence local ones, send out regular directives, info sheets, etc.

The businesspeople spread the C of C perspective/info to their non-C of C peers. If you're "in the club" you're likely to be influenced by your buds.

And that's just *one* of the business channels.

Of course, most of those channels come, at the top, from a *big* business/corporate perspective, & what's good for the majors isn't necessarily good for the minors.

For example, most of the small businesspeople I know for years blamed "unions" for everything bad, even though they themselves were in no danger of being unionized - too small, too local. In fact, unionization of national businesses might have benefited them: more people in the local community would have more money to spend, & operations like Home Depot (that sent every local hardware/lumber store out of business) would have found it harder to compete with the locals.

But their anti-union stance was so emotional, I think in many cases it was the product of Chamber of Commerce-type agit-prop operations + identification with the business class.

When I was heavily into charity work I saw this at board meetings - e.g. when Bush 2 first got into office, everyone was yucking it up about how there would be no blue dresses on his watch - like they were paragons of the Moral Majority.

Some *were* moral conservatives; however, many weren't, were actually rather - shall we say - "liberal" in their personal morals & connections. But they identified with the business/financial PR of the bush admin & nothing bush did re morality was likely to touch them much - cause they had money. They smoke pot & take pills, but want to crack down on the meth heads. They cheat on their wives but want to crack down on unwed mothers. If their girlfriends need an abortion, they can fly them to a clinic.

Crack down on the unwashed, they're in favor of it. That's different.