View this link:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/7/17/12526/4386

Daily Kos has some interesting poll figures indicating that the majority of Americans are actually much further to the left than one would otherwise suspect. Obviously poll figures are hardly sacrosanct, but I think they lend some due credence to the suspicion that the notion of the “middle-class moderate” majority is essentially a fantasy discourse propagated by the media and political elite.

We reflect the majority opinion of this country on pretty much every issue, yet the media continues to pretend that we’re the far left, the lunatic fringe. They’re still unwilling to admit the obvious…we are the mainstream.

But it’s not just the media. The idea that the majority of Americans are moderate in the apolitical sense is a groundless ideological assertion that has successfully propagated itself at nearly every level of social consciousness, such that any evidence that contradicts it is read as being partisan.

Obviously, it would be very discomforting for the Right to find out how little support their ideas actually have amongst the majority of Americans, but it seems that they are aware of this, which is why (to borrow a concept from Adam Kotsko) there is and always has been a clear asymmetry in relation to the truth between the Left and the Right: to take an example from this election year, the notion that John McCain is a warmonger is not actually far from the truth, given the innumerable quips he has made about killing Iranians, whereas the notion that Barack Obama is a Communist secret Muslim is simply a paranoid racist fantasy.

Unless you take most people to be less intelligent than yourself, in which case you are most likely an asshole, it really shouldn’t be surprising at all that most Americans (and most people in general) are more concerned with truth than lurking in the cesspool of their most idiotic and self-indulgent fantasies.