Because I am writing a book on the
Founding Fathers and the American right, I have had the opportunity over the
past year or so to read the collected oeuvre of MM/Mme Glenn Beck, Sean
Hannity, Mark Levin, Anne Coulter, and dozens of other right-wing
conservatives. In all of their works, I have encountered a political type
called the “liberal”—a scary sort of fellow who supports trashing the
Constitution for sport, turning America into a Communist State, and sending all
children to Atheist Summer Camp on their seventh birthday.
OK, the Atheist Summer Camp is an
exaggeration. The others, not so much. Every one of these books is organized
around opposing the massive threat from the left that is now (more than any
other time in history in most cases) threatening to engulf our way of life. And
I admit that they had me scared for a while. I don’t want our country run by
these liberals any more than Glenn Beck does. They are scary.
The problem is that they don’t exist.
Not really. Oh, there are liberals here and there—mostly in English Departments
(where I have spent most of my career) and in some of the social sciences. But
there really is not—and has not been for some time—anything like a functioning
left in this country. Think about it.
When
was the last time you heard seven politicians argue about who the “genuine
liberal” was? Do you remember how, in 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
went into all of those debates to argue about who was the real successor to the
McGovern legacy? Yea, me neither.
What we have in America is a right and
a center, with one party (the Democrats) positioned almost entirely in the
center and another (the GOP) trying hard to stay somewhere near the center but
not managing to do so with its own base constantly veering off to the hard
right. Barack Obama, who is certainly the most liberal US president of my
lifetime, barely qualifies as “slightly left of center” on any rational
international or historical scale.
This
is a guy who spent most of his presidency fighting two wars, taking out bad
guys, preserving tax increases, and cutting deals with people so far to the
right that they could not would not have been elected by either party fifty
years ago. Even his trademark bit of left-wing social engineering—the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care—is basically just a sloppy wet kiss to the
insurance industry masquerading as universal health care. No real socialist
would even return the guys e-mail.
But if you spend any time at all
listening to right-wing radio or reading the ultraconservative press (trust me
on this), you will be constantly bombarded by plaintive wails. Obama is a
Socialist. The Democrats are trashing the Constitution. This is what liberals
do. Etc. ad infinitum.
What this has allowed the far-right to
do is create one of the most skewed political landscapes that we have ever seen
in this country—a world in which a traditional conservative (say, Mitt Romney)
is classified as a moderate, a pragmatic centrist (Obama) is seen as a liberal,
and blithering nincompoops like Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich are seen as
acceptably conservative.
Fortunately, the center is still where
most of the people are and have always been. Just today, I came across this
graphic in the Chronicle of Higher Education (bottom of page) describing the political
views of college students from 1970 (back when most of them were supposedly
hippies) to 2011. What the graphic shows is that, today, about 20% of students
self-identified as conservative, a little over 25% identify as liberal, and
over 50% identify as “middle of the road.” Back in 1970, on the other hand,
about 20% of the students self-identified as conservative, a little over 25%
identified as liberal, and a solid majority considered themselves “middle of
the road.” And these results are pretty constant across different age
demographics.
Most Americans are, and always have
been, somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. These days, a
significant minority consider themselves conservative to very conservative.
Very few people consider themselves liberal, and even those won’t admit it. If
Democrats can capture the center and hold it, they just might become the first
party ever to be returned to power during a major recession.
