>Take voting. Conservative Republicans consistently receive nearly half
>of the popular votes if the opposing candidate is a centrist Democrat
>(cf. Bush vs. Gore), but that support skyrockets if the Democrat is even
>slightly leaning to the left. Such was the case even the supposedly
>"liberal" 1960s and 1970s cf. McGovern 37.5% vs. Nixon 60.7% in 1972.
Both Dukakis and Gore rose in the polls when they took an anti-corporate "populist" stance, and fell when their rhetoric turned more conservative.
McGovern was a candidate 32 years ago. The world is very different today.
And the point I was trying to make isn't that the U.S. population is full of leftist sentiments - it's that your portrait of the masses as profoundly conservative is wrong. The pictures is much more complex and contradictory than that.
>What is more, the left leaning publications, such as The Nation, Mother
>Jones, or even New Yorker, are not very popular. If the Us population
>was so overwhelmingly supportive of the positions "owned" by the Left,
>one would expect the sales of these publications to be much higher,
>especially that there not that many titles on the Left.
The New Yorker is a very popular magazine; I can't imagine what you're talking about. It's not as popular as People, of course, but it's not pitched to quite as mass an audience.
The Nation has the highest circ of any journal of opinion. It left The New Republic in the dust long ago, and recently surpassed National Review.
>PS. Most of the people with whom I came to a direct contact during my
>24 or so year stay in the US (longer than in any other country) were
>fairly centrist, even by the European standards. But then I have worked
>mainly in government or academic institutions, and lived mainly in
>Northern CA and Northeast (NYC - DC area). Judging what I see in
>central PA (my wife's home state) - which is fairly representative of
>anything outside the SF Bay Area, NYC, Boston, DC areas - it is solidly
>conservative and often bordering on fascism.
Most Americans don't live in places like Central PA, David Brooks to the contrary.
Doug