A relatively new commentator here, DTOzone is given to spouting a number of rightwing memes, perhaps most notably:
Wake up and look around you...your in a conservative right wing country.
Elsewhere, in support of this claim, he said that one could find a conservative poll result for every liberal one. Well, not exactly. As I've written many, many times, Americans tend to identify as more conservative, but when it comes to policy positions, they tend to be liberals instead. I sort of stumbled into a sequence of ideas for several diaries today, and citing one of America's leading authorities on the subject seemed to be a good way to kick things off. James Stimson is a professor of political science at UNC Chapel Hill, and author of Public opinion in America: moods, cycles, and swings. The following chart is currently on his homepage, and it shows how American public opinion varies considerably over time, but always in a range of predominantly liberal opinion:
As can be seen from the chart above, Reagan benefited in his 1980 election from a record low level of liberalism--but even then the country was more liberal than conservative. The reason Reagan was elected was not because of his policy positions, but because he connected with people, which is what he'd been paid for for all of his professional life as an actor. As soon as he took office, the country started moving sharply back in a liberal direction. So much for his vaunted abilities as "the great communicator." If communicating his policies was the point--as virtually all political commentators assume--then he was a miserable failure. Of course, it wasn't that simple. But that is the false assumption on which the "center-right nation" meme depends.
Some relevant extended passages from Stimson's book on the flip.
In a further elaboration, framed in terms of discussing the 1994 election and its aftermath, Stimson write, on p. 128:
The problem that liberals and Democrats have is that conservatives and Republicans seem to understand this intuitively, and they craft their political messaging, and all their political strategy, accordingly. For all their vaunted "reality-based" self-congratulations, liberals and Democrats do not.
In my next diary, I look at the patterns of trifectas in American politics, and the anomaly of the last 40 years, a period that overlaps with the charts in this diary.
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