Beyond trying to explain TV preferences, this question is important -- or at least the potential answers raise important questions -- because explanations like yours tend to make us blind to very different ways that people come to do conservative-looking things. From my own experience organizing and working as a therapist, and from man other writings list (Lillian Rubin's "Worlds of Pain" comes to mind, but there are a bunch more) Ehrenreich's conjectures about why some of her workmates really care about their boss' opinion of them and tend to try to accomodate themselves to hardship are just dead on. They want to give their jobs some value, they don't want to be seen as "lazy troublemakers," and the very intensity of their dissatisfaction can make them cling to authority. This can't simply be reduced to a correlate of a lack of left institutions; more positively, it may be possible to talk with them before those institutions exist. Randy
>
> Yes, but how that counter-movement is channelled makes all the difference
> in the world. .... There is no political institution in the US
> that is able to effectively channel these discontents to the left causes
> and policies. I once thought that Labor Party may become such an
> institution, but apparently it was dud.
>
> The left will be politically meaningless in this country as long as it
does
> not have a mainstream institutional representation.
>
> wojtek
>
>