Alternet
A new poll reveals that most Americans don't know their right from their left ... wing. The right knows this and leads the manipulation race.
By Matt Taibbi, New York Press. Posted February 25, 2005.



The Harris polling agency last week released the results of an interesting study. In a survey of 2,209 adults, they discovered that most Americans only have the vaguest idea of the meaning of two important pairs of words that play crucial roles in the national political discourse: conservative and liberal, and left and right.

Some of the numbers are surprising. According to the survey, 37 percent of Americans think liberals oppose gun control, or else they are not sure if liberals oppose gun control. Likewise, 27 percent of respondents thought a right-winger was someone who supported affirmative action. Furthermore, the survey showed that respondents generally viewed the paired concepts liberals and left-wingers and conservatives and right-wingers as possessing, respectively, generally similar political beliefs – with one caveat. In both cases, respondents were roughly 10 percent more clueless about left-wingers and right-wingers than they were about liberals and conservatives.

"The label left-winger is broadly perceived to be similar to liberal," the agency concluded, "except that more people are not sure what it means."

Respondents were asked to define the labels according to what their positions were on seven "political issues": abortion rights, gun control, cutting taxes, gay rights, same-sex marriage, affirmative action and moral values. This list of issues is preposterous in itself as a symbolic reflection of the political landscape, but that's a discussion for another time. To me the most instructive category was "moral values." According to the survey, 78 percent of respondents believe conservatives support moral values, while only 40 percent said the same about left-wingers. In fact, 29 percent said they believed left-wingers actually opposed moral values.

I'm glad the Harris people never called me for this survey, because I would have had to answer "not sure" to every question. Even after working as a political reporter for many years, I still have absolutely no idea what the American versions of left and right mean – what they mean in an ideological sense, that is. It's hard not to be confused when we call a saber-rattling free trader like John Kerry far left, while a man who keeps a portrait of Lenin on his wall, like Grover Norquist, is considered the very definition of a right-winger.

When I see someone called a leftist or left-leaning in print, I'm never sure whether they're talking about an actual communist, or just some timorous capitalist yuppie whom David Brooks spotted drinking a latte, or standing in line to see Cinema Paradiso. Politically, it's just not a very concise definition.

But of course we all know exactly what left means, when we're talking about social labels. In common parlance, left is clearly code for "feckless, pseudo-intellectual wiener," while right is code for "winner" and "the people who are actually running things while you assholes are reading James Joyce." Left also emphatically stands for "wrong side of history," while right is explicitly understood to mean the only remaining legitimate vision for future social organization. All ambitious politicians run screaming from the word left, understanding it to be a fatal electoral contagion, whereas being labeled right-wing even adds a winner's aura to an openly drooling political psychopath, like Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning.

Historically, the term left originated with the French Jacobins (they sat on the left in the Assemblies of the French Revolution) and the Stalinists who gave a 20th century gift of Jacobinism to about 20 million victims. That's what the term leftist meant for about 200 years: a bloodthirsty fiend who seized your property and chopped off your head. You'll never hear the editorial board of The Nation admitting that they're in any way the inheritors of this excellent legacy, but this implication is always lurking somewhere in the back of every right-wing caricature of the modern left.

For one thing, the left in these quarters is always described as a tiny minority of over-educated elites, desperate to seize power and impose some blockheaded, sweepingly sinister grad-school theory on decent folk. Beyond that, conservative writers always manage to have guillotines, terror-bombers, death-camps and other relics of the glorious leftist past ready to stick in some nearby paragraph whenever the modern left is described.

Here's this trick on display in a Miami Herald piece from last fall called "Left-leaning intellectuals, voters and their values." It takes writer Carlos Montaner about three sentences here to turn Noam Chomsky into a Shining Path terrorist:

I especially like that part about turning Chomsky into a Shining Path Terrorist.

The Alternet Piece points out a clear case of our "librul" media falling down on the job. Political discourse in this country is so muddled by misleading "journalists" it's a wonder our electorate knows anything at all. They certainly have no clue as to the real issues are in any given campaign.

Yes, politics is theater. But does it have to be really bad third rate theater?

Why is it that I have to read obscure indy news sources or European newspapers to get the news? It shouldn't be that way.

Like someone pointed out on another thread, we need the Fairness Doctrine and Media Mega Corps broken up. The media is in too few hands.

If you look at the survey and imagine what these 2,209 adults have for an education, you can guess the majority probably are under the age of 45. With that said, the majority probably have some degree of right and wrong. Giving the word "righteous" as morally and justifiable, they tend to believe that the right-wing Conservatives are in the "righteous" group.

You must also consider in today's society, the younger generation are govern by "association" to what ever they like to follow. And that goes back to the word "righteous", meaning the association with the right-wing.

Basicially what you have with teh Rightious and the Right wing is an argument about framing. This is a phenomenon that desperately need to be understood by the left.


George Lakoff

An introduction to Framing

How to Respond to Conservatives

The Radical Rights Weakness

Check around the RockRidge Institute (the above links) Much good information there.

An additional bonus for understanding the Framing concept AND being able to use it, once you get into this you should quickly see how much you can use this concept in every aspect of your communicating life!

BUT! Please understand that when this article says people make a connection between being righteous and the right, thats a framing issue. Understanding how frames work is the only way to break that frame.

As you will learn, trying to kill the frame invokes the frame.

Do NOT think of a pink Elephant! Stating it made it impossible!

Learn framing and you can learn how to REFRAME.


I have begun trying to understand this process for myself. The first thing that happened for me was how much I see this very same framing thing all around me! A guy at work says he'll "help me with this project" when in fact, IT'S HIS JOB! He framed me! His statement planted responsibility for the project on me, and it also attached strings as, now I owed HIM a favor. (for helping him do HIS job!) The problem I have though, is how do I tell the guy to go to hell with out making an issue of it? I haven't yet figured out how to reframe this situation. Being able to see it though, is the first page in this learning process. Generally my reaction is to not volunteer to help this guy anymore. (I'm busy)

Another easy to spot frame.

Originially Bushco refered to the SS reform as Privatizing Social Security. That doesn't sound good. The frame image it created was of a private company in charge, which didn't sit will. Generally now Bushco calls it, creating "personal accounts". This word choice makes it sound like it's MINE!

The progressives need a nicer, more socially acceptable Rove who breathes framing and understands the process better than he understands his own wife. (easy enough then?)

I'm saying we need someone that understand the mental process of the average American. Maybe some college, 2 year degree, non professionals that haven't traveled out of the state in 20 years, if ever! Someone who can see the world through the eyes of others, however right or wrong that may be!


OK now, go learn about framing!

Hey thanks for the links....


Doc