When you're in the right ditch, the double yellow line down the center of the road looks like left to you.
What you are seeing is the successful effort to redefine the political spectrum with a massive shift to the right, such that the mainstream corporate media avoids explicit references to right wing lunatics, which is exactly what they are. They are now referred to as "values voters" (or my personal favorite "low information voters," a euphemism heard now and again during the last presidential election. The fact that this categorization did not draw howls of outrage from the right wing shows that they do not have the vocabulary required to comprehend the insult inherent in that phrase.) The shift has been so successful that, not only have the right wing twits been given an air of respectability totally undeserved and at odds with the stench of their racism, homophobia, and religious intolerance, they are rarely taken to task for their complete inability to accurately discern what their best interests are and vote accordingly, even when someone like Wendell Potter, ex-VP of Corporate Relations for CIGNA, one of the health insurance giants, tells them explicitly that all the allegations about rationing of health care in Canada and the UK made by opponents of the public option are LIES.
In addition, when a center-right Democrat like Bill Clinton, a founding member of the corporately funded Democratic Leadership Council, is called a leftist, there is a serious problem with cognitive dissonance. No, check that. Let's call it what it is: butt-ignorant. No self-respecting liberal president, let alone an alleghed "leftist" ideologue, would ever support, much less sign into law such anti-liberal and/or pro-corporate rot as NAFTA, the WTO, Welfare Reform, the Defense of Marriage Act, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, telecommunications deregulation, or participate in the further weakening of the FCC's regulations on media ownership, like Clinton did. Anyone who thinks he was a flaming liberal simply has no idea what liberalism is, nor does anyone who thinks that "liberal" equals "leftist."
The current popular model of the political spectrum, a one-dimensional continuum from right-wing (fascism) to left-wing (communism), has several fatal flaws, not the least of which is its inability to discern between liberals and conservatives on the one hand, and the ideologically driven wingers of both sides on the other hand. It is better understood as a two-dimensional circular model, where the y-axis (vertical) delineates the liberalconservative split, and the x-axis (horizontal) denotes the split between those who are ideologically driven and those for whom the individual citizen's best interests are paramount. At the top of the y-axis at 0 degrees is liberal (small L) democracy, the founders' gift to the world, and at the bottom at 180 is dictatorship, and to the man in the street, there isn't a nickel's worth of difference between a communist dictatorship and a fascist one. China made the change from a communist regime to a fascist regime the second they signed their first agreement with a multinational corporation (because there is quite simply no such thing as a communist capitalist), yet at no time did they pass through a stage of liberal democracy, as they would have to in the conventional linear model of the political spectrum. No, they just took the small step from 18o degrees, 0 minutes and 1 second to 179 degrees, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds.
My point, and the implicit point of Mott's post above, is that the left/right delineation is essentially meaningless, because no matter which way you lean, left or right, if you lean too far in either direction, you end up in a dictatorship, and neither direction is more likely than the other to lead to authoritarian rule,
The more important distinction is the horizontal split between those above the x-axis, whose focus is on the individual, and those below it, who are driven by ideology. Above the line, you have meaningful debate between true liberals and true conservatives leading to consensus and compromise. Below it you have no meaningful debate. Instead, you have ideological pissing matches leading to scorched earth obstructionism, with no possibility of compromise. At this point in time, the GOP is firmly in the grasp of the chittering ideologues for whom the only division that exists is the right/left division, and who are so brain dead, they think Obama, who is barely (if at all) to the left of center, is simultaneously a Marxist and a fascist, a socialist and a Nazi, which by definition of all four terms, is oxymoronic. The true, thoughtful conservatives, and by that i mean people who believe in 1) limited, but not nonexistent, government, 2) fiscal restraint, 3) personal responsibility, and 4) that progress, while necessary in some cases, and advisable in many others, needs to be leavened with a respect for what has worked in the past.
Works for me.
