We’re Skewed

I used to characterize my political views as “conservative centrist”. I saw myself as having political views that, while right of center, were for the most part moderate; I tend to use the terms “moderate” and “centrist” synonymously.

Recently, however, I decided that I could no longer call myself a centrist. It seemed to me from media reports that, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, centrism had left me—that is, that the normal distribution, rather than being a bell-shaped curve, had become skewed to the left, with nothing to the right anymore except a long tail.

Of course, everyone knows about the liberal bias of the mainstream media—as Bernard Goldberg says in his book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, it’s not that the mainstream media outlets are biased toward liberalism intentionally, it’s just that mainstream journalists are never exposed to anything else. Thus, I’d been able to take comfort from a recent poll showing that, “[d]espite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal.”

Now, courtesy of Andrew Thomas, comes word that Obama wants to claim the mantle of “moderate” for himself to avoid being “branded as a liberal by his own party.” As Mr. Thomas says, “If Mr. Obama is a ‘moderate’, then what is a ‘liberal’ in this brave new world?” For that matter, what is a “leftist”, a “statist”, a “socialist”, a “fascist” in this brave new world?

This from the man who claims that words matter.