The bed of Procrustes

Politicians think Americans are super-conservative

Most Americans rarely pay any attention to pollitics and more than half never do.

Ask them their ‘druthers and you get a blank stare or bullshit from a loon seizing his moment of fame, playing a role he saw on TV.

Such preferences as any individual really has will almost never fall neatly, much less completely, into column A marked “liberal” or column B marked “conservative.”

Talk about how liberal or how conservative America is is mostly just self-serving eyewash from the classe politique, so obsessed with itself it sees its own likeness – mostly costume and makeup, anyway – everywhere.

But what can you expect from people who write like this?

“It’s a center-right country,” we hear all the time, which it turns out is both meaningless and untrue.

Alex Pareene at Salon.

His emphasis on "and."