CenterShot: The Myth Of The Middle

By Edger, Section Diaries
Posted on Sat Jul 05, 2008 at 03:50:53 AM EST
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Lately there has been a growing and increasingly loudly voiced call from some of the more extreme centrists and from the DLC itself pushing the idea that to win elections - the upcoming 2008 presidential election comes to mind for some strange reason - and gain power Democrats will have to move sharply to the right, and that liberals and progressives are dooming America to successive republican administrations.

Sunday morning, March 11, 2007 in "Where Is America's True Center?" David Sirota wrote that:

The purported proof of such an assertion by Democratic Leadership Council mouthpieces Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston was this finding:
"In 2004, only 21 percent of voters called themselves liberal, while 34 percent said they were conservative. The rest, 45 percent, characterized themselves as moderate."
The Washington media joined with Kamarck and Galston in billing this as an extraordinary finding that proved once and for all that Democrats must become more "moderate" or "conservative" because so few voters labeled themselves "liberal."

Sirota also went on in the same post to note that:

[C]onservative pundit James Joyner shows exactly what I'm talking about. Responding to a new Gallup poll showing more Americans label themselves conservative rather than liberal, Joyner admits:
"This is especially interesting considering that the public seems to continue to demand liberal policies, opposing even nominal market-based reform of Social Security, continuing to push for the socialization of health care, expecting instant bail-outs for poor financial decisions, and generally wanting more federal spending on a variety of social programs."
Put another way, all that corporate front groups inside the Democratic Party really prove when they cite polls on "liberal" vs. "moderate" vs. "conservative" labeling is how well the right has vilified the term "liberal" and how nebulously appealing and Apple Pie-ish a term like "moderate" is - but they prove nothing about where the public actually is on issues. That the Washington media goes out of its way to ignore this by, for instance, continuing to label as "fringe" antiwar Democrats representing the antiwar position of most Americans is a testament to how powerful the Beltway status-quo-defending propaganda system really is.

So what do the numbers really show us about where the mainstream of America is on the political spectrum? Well, in late 2004 and early 2005 Pew Research conducted an in depth Political Typology study of American society: Beyond Red vs. Blue. It's Principal Findings, among other things, were that:

Coming out of the 2004 election, the American political landscape decidedly favored the Republican Party. The GOP had extensive appeal among a disparate group of voters in the middle of the electorate, drew extraordinary loyalty from its own varied constituencies, and made some inroads among conservative Democrats. These advantages outweighed continued nationwide parity in party affiliation. Looking forward, however, there is no assurance that Republicans will be able to consolidate and build upon these advantages.

Republicans have neither gained nor lost in party identification in 2005. Moreover, divisions within the Republican coalition over economic and domestic issues may loom larger in the future, given the increasing salience of these matters. The Democratic party faces its own formidable challenges, despite the fact that the public sides with them on many key values and policy questions. Their constituencies are more diverse and, while united in opposition to President Bush, the Democrats are fractured by differences over social and personal values.

And as Profiles of the Typology Groups break down, Liberals [Liberal Democrats/Seculars/60's Democrats] comprise the largest group at 17% of General Population and 19% of Registered Voters, followed by Conservative Democrats at 15% of Adult Population and 15% of registered Voters.

Enterprisers [Staunch Conservatives] made up only 9% of Adult Population and 10% Registered Voters, tied with Pro-Government Conservatives on both scores.

Liberals have swelled to become the largest voting bloc in the typology.

And since Pew Research did their study there have been a couple of curious occurrences. Just anomolous blips, obviously. Probably mean very little, if anything. Heh. One was the November 2006 mid-term election rout of the rethugs. That was a good indication of a strong rightward shift, no? What the hell could people have been thinking? Didn't they know? Hadn't anyone told them that they were supposed to move to the right? Jesus, just how in the hell are you going to run a proper democracy unless people do what they're told? Things would be so much easier if this were a dictatorship, right George?

George? Well, since the 2006 midterm elections George W. Bush's job approval ratings have continued the same calamitous slide towards falling off the bottom edge of the page. (see Historical Bush Approval Ratings)

Liberal progressives as a group are beating the rest of 'em, hands down.

Sirota concluded with the observation that:

Democrats major problem in recent years has been their willingness to listen to the tired - and inaccurate - rhetoric of people like Kamarck and Galston who have continued to push the party away from America's true center.

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CenterShot: The Myth Of The Middle | 4 comments (4 topical)

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Distortion of words (5.00 / 1) (#4)
by MO Blue on Mon Jul 07, 2008 at 02:51:49 AM EST

Seems to me that the actual meaning of the word moderate gets distorted. Politicians and positions on the right and sometimes on the edge of the far right have somehow been labeled as moderate. OTOH anything even the slightest bit the left of center is often labeled as the far left. We see the designation of "far left" being thrown around even in the so called Democratic blogs. It is normally used to discount positions contrary to those of the person assigning the label. In reality, the "far left" IMO is almost nonexistent in the party.

The conditions on the ground do not IMO require any Democratic candidate to adopt Republican agendas to get elected. People need jobs. People need to find ways to make ends meet with all the necessities costing more and more each day. Sick people need health care and many can't get it. People need to believe that the president and their government cares about their problems and will actually work to find solutions. This is what the Dems need to talk about intelligently and offer real solutions not fluff and not try and out Republican Republicans.

A lot of us would also like to see our Constitutional rights restored and not have both parties working at eliminating them.

: Exactly. (none / 0) (#5)
by Edger on Mon Jul 07, 2008 at 04:39:02 AM EST

One perfect example of framing in a somewhat successful attempt, with the help of mainsteam media, to move the perceived "center" as far to the right as possible.
Operation Comeback
By Joshua Muravchik, American Enterprise Institute

TO: My Fellow Neoconservatives
FROM: Joshua Muravchik
RE: How to Save the Neocons
We neoconservatives have been through a startling few years. Who could have imagined six years ago that wild stories about our influence over U.S. foreign policy would reach the far corners of the globe? The loose group of us who felt impelled by the antics of the 1960s to migrate from the political left to right must have numbered fewer than 100. And we were proven losers at Washington's power game: The left had driven us from the Democratic Party, stolen the "liberal" label, and successfully affixed to us the name "neoconservative." In reality, of course, we don't wield any of the power that contemporary legend attributes to us. Most of us don't rise at the crack of dawn to report to powerful jobs in government. But it is true that our ideas have influenced the policies of President George W. Bush, as they did those of President Ronald Reagan. That does feel good. Our intellectual contributions helped to defeat communism in the last century and, God willing, they will help to defeat jihadism in this one. It also feels good to see that a number of young people and older converts are swelling our ranks.
The price of this success is that we are subjected to relentless obloquy. "Neocon" is now widely synonymous with "ultraconservative" or, for some, "dirty Jew." A young Egyptian once said to me, "`Neoconservative' sounds to our ears like `terrorist' sounds to yours." I am shocked to hear that some among us, wearying of these attacks, are sidling away from the neocon label. Where is the joie de combat? The essential tenets of neoconservatism--belief that world peace is indivisible, that ideas are powerful, that freedom and democracy are universally valid, and that evil exists and must be confronted--are as valid today as when we first began. That is why we must continue to fight. But we need to sharpen our game. Here are some thoughts on how to do it:
...
Prepare to Bomb Iran.

What is Obama thinking? (none / 0) (#1)
by Edger on Sat Jul 05, 2008 at 03:56:13 AM EST

Glenn Greenwald analyzes Obama's "reasoning" (such that it is) in his dissection of Obama's statement yesterday "explaining" himself. (hat tip to Armando)

Obama's new statement on FISA

Exclusivity is obviously no reason to change the current FISA law since it already has exclusivity in it. Obama:
In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people.

The government already has "the authority to collect the intelligence it needs to protect the American people." That authority is called FISA, which already allows the Government extremely broad authority to spy on any suspected terrorists. The current law results in virtually no denials of any spying requests. So how can Obama -- echoing the Bush administration -- claim a new law is needed to provide "the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people" when the current FISA law already provides that?
But in a free society, that authority cannot be unlimited. As I've said many times, an independent monitor must watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people. This compromise law assures that the FISA court has that responsibility.

This is just false. The new FISA bill that Obama supports vests new categories of warrantless eavesdropping powers in the President (.pdf), and allows the Government, for the first time, to tap physically into U.S. telecommunications networks inside our country with no individual warrant requirement. To claim that this new bill creates "an independent monitor [to] watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people" is truly misleading, since the new FISA bill actually does the opposite -- it frees the Government from exactly that monitoring in all sorts of broad categories.

There is a word. A word that Greenwald politely avoided using. A common synonym for "false" or "misleading". The word is not "pragmatism".

When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.
There have been similar dilemmas for the labor movement. Indeed, it is a common occurrence that unions, fighting for a new contract, must decide if they will accept an offer that gives them only part of what they have demanded. It's always a difficult decision, but in almost all cases, whether the compromise can be considered a victory or a defeat, the workers have been given some thing palpable, improving their condition to some degree. If they were offered only a promise of something in the future, while continuing an unbearable situation in the present, it would not be considered a compromise, but a sellout. A union leader who said, "Take this, it's the best we can get" [...] would be hooted off the platform.

-- Howard Zinn

Thanks, Dalton. (none / 0) (#3)
by Edger on Sat Jul 05, 2008 at 02:45:02 PM EST

I think it's important for liberal progressives to realize, to know, that they are the real political and social mainstream, regardless of how much the media and the purported "leaders" of the Democratic or Republican parties might try to convince them otherwise, and that it is those so-called "leaders" doing everything they can do to pull the wool over people eyes with a false coke or pepsi choice who are the real fringe radicals.