Lawrence O'Donnell, now a self-proclaimed Socialist, went at it with "mere Progressive" Glenn Greenwald on Morning Joe the other day. At one point O'Donnell said that despite his personal politics, he knows that only 20% of Americans self-identify as Liberal while some 40+% identify as conservatives. So is O'Donnell right? Is America a hopelessly conservative country for which any attempt at implementing a progressive agenda is hopeless?
I'd argue that when it comes to cultural values most Americans lean conservative, but not necessarily when it comes to power and money issues. The populist movement was pretty hard left when it came to power and money, even though it was rather culturally conservative. Republican communication strategists realize that there's nothing natural that keeps cultural conservatives aligned with the elites who work through the GOP, so they've developed a two pronged strategy that has worked very effectively to keep cultural conservatives in the GOP camp.
And then it's not that hard a sell for Republican communications strategists to align traditional cultural agenda with a Libertarian no-taxes, no-regulation agenda favored by the power elite. The two are not natural bedfellows, but Republican strategists have been able to accomplish this alignment by first making government, especially when Democrats control it, to seem "evil" because of its association and support of the pro-choice, pro-minority, pro-gay, liberal cultural agenda. This liberal agenda makes cultural conservatives feel that the government is slowly destroying the moral fabric of the American society, and they see the people who promote it as evil.
So Republican strategists can couple this fundamental anti-government sentiment with its anti-tax, anti-regulation message. Why feed a government that is destroying the moral fabric of the country? We need to shrink government so that its influence will be diminished. We need to keep government out of our lives. The more government intrusion, the more the government destroys the moral fabric of the nation. If the government isn't going to support and reinforce the traditionalist worldview, then the government must be refused the revenues it needs to implement its program.
This, I'd argue, is the link between cultural and religious conservatives and Libertarians. Libertarianism is the ideology of the nation's power elites. It suffuses corporate and media culture, and even though Libertarian power elites could care less about traditional values and are fine with abortion and gay rights, they can live with the cultural conservative agenda, so long as conservatives support their no-tax, no-regulation agenda. The power elites are Libertarians whose values do not in the least align with those of the traditionalists; nevertheless, elites stir the anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-minority pot to keep traditionalists angry and distracted.
So long as the cultural right see cultural liberals as the enemy and not the power elites, there can be no popular coalition to oppose them. Unfortunately, the cultural left predictably plays its role just as the elites expect it to. These elites look upon both parties with contempt, as too stupid to understand where their real interests and alliances should lie. Both the cultural left and right make their strategy too easy to effect. Both sides are playing into the the Republican rhetorical strategy perfectly. Until both figure out how they are being played, this country will be owned by the banks and Wall Street.
If fighting for or against gay marriage rights or restricting abortion is more important for you than fighting to take the country back from the power elites, fine. You have a right to your priorities. But my guess is that most Americas on the cultural left and right, and most in the middle, see taking back the country from Wall Street as the higher priority. The question is whether anyone will emerge to make such an money and power issues centered coalition a reality. It requires someone to define "true center", and to fight against the power elite's self-serving definition of it, which is the conventional wisdom served up in the media.