Pay them no mind. They think Fidel Castro is the President of the US.

@RuthAlice

Yes, many Americans hold some conservative values, but they reject the Republican policy of ramming those values down people's throats and codifying them into law. Most Americans actually realize that they are not the state and they don't feel diminished in anyway if their personal grudges, values and foibles are not codified as the LAW OF THE LAND for all people. That's the key difference that you just don't understand.

Bravo there RuthAlice, well put. Most conservatives are generally in agreement with those principles, however the rub is that unless the custom or principle in question is codified into law, some dipstick liberal lawyer at the behest of some activist group will lobby the court or legislature to enact laws that go against the rational and national mainstream thought pattern, thus irreversibly changing the national culture and creating a 'law' that creates a de facto acceptance of an irrational and or societally destructive behavior. In essence and to use your own words "ramming those values down people's throats and codifying them into law".

Hence the word 'Conservative', as in to Conserve the traditional values and customs that most people consciously and some liberals, sub-consciously know are what made this a great country in the first place.

Now that point comes full circle to my next argument....How is it that the word 'Liberal' has become a dirty word? Do Liberals really give the so-called 'right-wing propaganda machine' the credit for destroying the word 'Liberal' to the point that you now call yourselves 'progressives'? Could it possibly be that there are inherent problems with liberalism and that as much as you try to wrap it up with slogans and feel-good posturing, it still looks like hooey to the rest of us? Could it be that the 'right wing propaganda machine' is really just apolitical people's acceptance of common sense values (read: Conservative values), based on subtle evolutionary cues that will always remain on the forefront of rational people's thinking?

Nah, we just have a better PR machine, right? Gosh knows that only die-hards tune in to Fox, Limbaugh et al. Or could it be that conservative values are recognized as 'species-enduring'?

The right just has a louder and more insulting publicity machine. The reason your polls get the results they do is because the majority of this country has been beaten to a pulp by conservative commentators so that every word has a double-meaning.

If every single liberal in this country used the phrase "philandering, pedophile conservative" in place of the word "conservative" in every single sentence, I expect you'd see less than 50% of America identifying them as a conservative also.

We get it, you've won the culture war. You've made everything good seem bad, and made no one want to identify themselves with liberals even if they are one.

Bravo. You've destroyed America to save it. Enjoy the ashes.

Isn't it time to put the kybosh on this ridiculous column? I'm all for representing both sides fairly, but this guys arguments have more holes than an agin room for Swiss cheese.

"America is neither a liberal nor a conservative country, but conservatives believe it skews to the right."

What self-identified conservatives believe is not the issue. Forget for the moment that our social, cultural, political, religious landscape is vastly multidimensional. Pretend that all this richness can be captured in a one-dimensional scale from Communist on the far left to Fascist on the far right. Ignore the inane choice of attempting to define the center with reference only to extremes.

This assertion still fails on the loose application of the word "skew". Picture a bell curve. It is captured by two parameters - the mean and the standard deviation. By definition - but not according to this anonymous party operative - the center of gravity of the country is precisely located where the mean of the distribution lies.

The mean is the first statistical moment. The standard deviation is the second moment. How broad is the distribution? Most people are located within just one standard deviation of the mean. Is this tightly clustered? Rather, one standard deviation (68% of the population) stretches all the way from Woodstock to Tulsa.

The "skew", however, is the second statistical moment. Is the bell symmetrical? Or is it squashed on one side? Republican dogma just appears to amount to an assertion that there is a long tail on "their side". From what this observer has seen, however, there is clearly a larger tail of divergent opinions on the left than on the right.

Should we next worry about the third moment? That's the "kurtosis" - an estimator of the peakedness of the distribution. Or has the absurdity of this exercise been demonstrated?

But the real issue - even in this imaginary 1-D vision of life - is that the American public doesn't form a bell curve at all. Politics since before Kennedy/Nixon has revealed a clear bimodal distribution - not one peak in the center, but two peaks on either side of the center. The average American lies squarely in the center-center of the political landscape, but the average American is a myth.

No.

There are no conservatives in the United States. Not real ones, at least. There are nationalist-theocratic-corporatists on the right, but they are not conservatives.

And the wingnut is a motherfucking liar.

Then again, he worked for the Bush administration, so no surprise there!

Salon, get rid of this moron.

Readers: stop looking at his page. Stop posting letters.

Nearly 1.5 days in and only 98 letters! Many of them simply expressing disbelief or anger that their Salon subscription is paying "Wingnut's" salary or trying to persuade others not to read/click. The number of letters actually addressing the content (or lack thereof) declines weekly.

Looks like it's time for another Paglia piece, Joan. See if you can talk your buddy Matt Drudge to link to it again. That must have been a relative 'click' goldmine!

The assertion that America "is" a "center-right" or "center-left" nation is oxymoronic. A statement about what America IS is by definition what it's average person thinks. Therefore it must be tautologically true that America is ALWAYS a centrist country.

Of course, the definition of what is or is not left, right, and center may change over time, and yesterday's left-wing wacko may be today's centrist. For example, Chris Mathews said a few years ago that "only the whack jobs didn't like President Bush". Nobody would say that now. Similarly, many people of my age have a sense that what used to be "moderate" would a few years ago be considered radical left. Many of the things that Richard Nixon, for example, supported, are objectively to the left of anything that Barack Obama dares to support. Which is not to say that Nixon's innermost desires were expressed by the policies he was compelled to lend his support to.

The argument that America is always and irrevocably "center-right" is absurd on its face. Compared to what? Rather, what America is moves back and forth. All it really means to the people who say it is that Americans are to the right of the government they elected. There's no basis for saying that and the durability of the current trends will only be evaluated in hindsight.