free thinking???????

[HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN]Tea Party shocker: Even right-wingers become liberals when they turn off Fox News[/URL][/FONT][/HIGHLIGHT]America's center is to the left, and even Tea Partyers are liberals when they turn off Rush and learn real facts[HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN]PAUL ROSENBERG[/URL][/FONT][/HIGHLIGHT]

As the government shutdown neared its end, an NBC/Esquire poll appeared trying to promote the idea of “New American Center.” Salon’s own Alex Pareene [HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN]skewered it[/URL] rather mercilessly, for various good reasons, not least of which was how the whole enterprise came off: “It seems like [HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN]marketing

[/HIGHLIGHT] for NBC and Esquire — we represent the sensible (and probably affluent) center! Don’t be scared of our political content, advertisers!” Pareene wrote. But there was more: “t is clearly very psychically important to the elite political media that a reasonable center exist. A common-sense, centrist middle is an essential, foundational myth of the nonpartisan press.[/FONT][/HIGHLIGHT][/SIZE]
And yet, as James Fallows pointed out in [HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN]“Breaking the News,”[/URL] in 1996, today’s elite media also thrives on superficial coverage of controvery, which makes it complicit in generating the very extremism it simultaneous deplores, condemns and needs to hold at bay in order to legitimate itself.[/FONT][/HIGHLIGHT]
With such a profoundly self-contradictory practice, it should not surprise us that the poll was even [HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN]more[/I] misleading than Pareene described. Polarization in some sense is real — and yet also partial, misleading and embedded in consensus as well. Tea Partyers ranting “Keep the government’s hands off my [HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN]Medicare

[/HIGHLIGHT]!” may seem comical — but they also show just how broad a true consensus can be. In fact, they reflect [HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN]two[/HIGHLIGHT] central (but routinely ignored) facts of American public opinion that have remained remarkably stable since the 1960s, despite all that’s changed since then:[/FONT][/HIGHLIGHT][/SIZE]
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[HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN] It’s not just the center vs. the extremes; there is broad consensus across the boards on the basic contours of government spending priorities — the historically most important dimension of political opinion.[/HIGHLIGHT]
[HIGHLIGHT=#NaNNaNNaN] It’s just that the center is not where it’s supposed to be: It’s not somewhere in between the two parties, it’s well to the left of the Democrats in D.C.[/HIGHLIGHT]

These two facts are both in full force with respect to the ongoing post-shutdown budget battle. In fact, a sophisticated poll covering 31 budget items as well as revenue sources conducted around the 2010 elections found that, even then, Republican, Democratic and independent voters all agreed on much higher taxes and much deeper defense cuts as the most striking elements of how the budget should be crafted. But before we examine that poll, we need to put these two key facts into long-term context.