> I think more importantly, real people don't usually fall into a left vs.
> right dichotomy. If someone for instance has liberal economic views but is
> totally convinced that abortion is murder and evil, they are probably going
> to support whatever political group they feel has the strongest antiabortion
> platform, even if the group is pushing an economic platform that they
> dislike.
>
If you crunch the numbers on the political beliefs of Americans (and, unsurprisingly, the votes of their representatives) you'll find that >90% of it can be explained by just two eigenvectors: the left-right spectrum and a racial politics axis, the second of which has been steadily declining in importance over time. There may or may not be a good reason for beliefs about abortion to correspond to those about marginal tax rates to correspond to those about war, but they do.
So most Americans who pay attention to politics _do_ fall into a left vs. right dichotomy, albeit not the median voter, who usually applies a heuristic involving the incumbent party and the unemployment rate.