America Is a Center-Left Country No Matter How Much the Corporate Media Say Otherwise

The American people are center-left (or at least firmly in the center) on the primary matters over which government presides: taxation and debt, public services, the regulation of the economy and America's role in the world.

But that hasn't stopped a lot of bloviating to the contrary. Only moments after the networks declared Barack Obama the winner of a dramatic realignment election, William Bennett, the conservative icon, declared on CNN that "America is still a center-right nation, no matter what anybody says."

Implied was that it also didn't matter what exit polls, mountains of public opinion data, shifts in partisan identification and changes in the country's demographics say. That stuff's apparently for the "reality-based" community to worry about.

Reality: an Election Day poll by the Center for American Progress and the Campaign for America's Future asked whether Republicans had lost because they were too conservative or not conservative enough. By a twenty point margin, voters chose “too conservative”, including independents who agreed by a 21 point margin. Seven out of ten said they wanted the Republicans to work with Obama and “help him achieve his plans,” while fewer than a quarter of respondents thought the GOP should try to keep him from implementing a progressive agenda.

That didn't prevent conservatives, desperate to spin a shellacking at the ballot box, from insisting that the contrary is true. House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) wrote a letter to his despondent — and shrinking — GOP caucus insisting that “Democrats should not make the mistake of viewing Tuesday’s results as a repudiation of conservatism.” And Republican Senator Jim DeMint (South Carolina) had the chutzpah to say that the lopsided election results only proved that “the American people agree with our ideas...”

These are nonsensical talking-points, but as journalist Matt Taibbi told Bill Maher at the height of the campaign, "You can run just about any bullshit up the flag pole, and the mainstream media will simply stand there and salute it, and repeat it seemingly within minutes."

That a great number of pundits did exactly that, immediately taking up the question of whether the U.S is center-right, is just more evidence that much of the traditional media's analysis of American politics is utterly worthless, and should probably just be ignored out of hand.

After all, there's a good deal of hard data (as we’ll see below) showing that Americans lean left on most substantive issues. But it's also a matter of common sense. During the campaign, the Republicans called Obama a socialist, clunkily accused him of being a "wealth redistributor" and held up Joe the Plumber as an example of the burdens small businesses like Exxon-Mobile and JP Morgan would have to bear under an Obama administration. In other words, they made this election explicitly about ideology, and Obama kicked their collective ass.

Again, that brutal beating took place mere moments before the blathering class started gazing into their navels in search of evidence of our center-right essence.

Of course, it is true that our friends in Western Europe, Canada and other liberal democracies scoff at our puritan tendencies on sexual matters. If America’s reaction to Janet Jackson's infamous flash of boob or the widespread perception that the entertainment media are unbearably smutty were legitimate proxies for ideology, then it might be fair to say that we lean rightward. The only issue over which progressives got creamed this year was gay marriage.

It's also true that because of our history, and some unfortunately vague text in our Constitution, there are a good number of Americans whose guns can only be pried from their cold, dead hands. And, finally, we're a heterogeneous, tribal country, and that leads to some resistance to various government programs not seen in wealthy democracies in which most of the population shares a similar ethnic background.