Yesterday Steve Burns posted a disturbing article on Oped News (my new venue, by the way) that called for the execution of liberalism, one that seems to conflate liberalism with progressivism.
He used as his jumping off point a recent Gallup poll that seems to suggest that American voters are already losing faith in a progressive agenda of which we've hardly seen a trace of evidence since perhaps the Carter administration.
Here's how Burns sums it up:
"A recent Gallup Poll showed widespread uncertainty about the "progressive" political label, with the majority of those responding (54%) saying they are unsure what "progressive" means. 31% felt they knew enough about "Progressive" to say that it doesn't describe their views, while 12% said that they were themselves progressive."
The reason why so many of us can't seem to distinguish "liberal" from "progressive", and I count Burns in with this confused majority, is that we've seen so little evidence of anything even remotely resembling either a liberal or progressive agenda. As Burns himself admits, our nation's youth have never known an America that hasn't been ruled by corporations just as surely as all children about to go into the 4th grade this September have never known an America that hasn't been at war.
A July 9-12 Bloomberg poll released just yesterday gives some news that should make a lot of Democratic lawmakers and the President pace the floor at night: 6 in 10 Americans in their national poll say that Afghanistan is a lost cause and about as many people feel our nation's headed in the wrong direction. Now, we're hearing ominous rumblings that, in spite of the huge gains made by Democrats in the last two elections, control of Congress is at stake. 36 Senate seats and, of course, all 435 House seats are up for grabs. Our once-infallible president's approval ratings, while still much higher than that of most Democratic lawmakers, are at an alltime low.
It isn't just teabaggers and mainstream conservative voters skewing these numbers. Many of those people still accuse Obama of being a Socialist, fascist, Muslim, illegal alien who wants to take away all their guns and money. Many Democratic voters, including the aforementioned 12% of who supposedly align ourselves with the so-called progressive "movement", are similarly disenfranchised, albeit for completely different reasons.
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