Michael Moore assessment

I just got an email from Mr. Moore about the recent Supreme Court decision on the healthcare bill. Why has it taken so long for liberals to realize and articulate this? It's really pathetic because our society and our planet have suffered so much for at least 20 years because of what he is describing, with very little resistance from the left. He describes what he calls the real divide in America: "On that first side are the people who've been fed a diet of fear and lies and hate. And who is feeding them? The 1%. The richest people in the country, the ones who aren't done with us yet because they still don't have enough wealth, have done their best to dumb down the population through destroying our educational system and using media to provide them with a vastly distorted sense of reality. The rich's only obstacle is that they only hold 1% of the votes in the country. So they have to try to get a slim majority of Americans to vote their way. And fear, plus keeping them stupid, usually works."

Conservative/Liberal

Conservative is a misnomer for the current movement in American politics that dates back to 1994 contract with America. Ironically what most characterizes the movement is an embrace of economic libertarianism (which I loathe because it's both stupid and evil, but that's another discussion). It's a fundamentalist version of "liberal" economic policy, i.e. laissez-faire, that we're familiar with from Dickens novels etc. The current version is not conservative at all as it has tried to make big changes in the social contract, getting rid of or privatizing many or most of the public sector. Us hapless liberals are cast as the conservatives, desperately and not very successfully trying to save the institutions (social security, medicare, national parks, public education, foster care, etc.) that the "greatest" and earlier generations built for us. The words liberal and conservative could both be very positive, but political consultants have done a very good job injecting them with venom. I remember reading a survey from around 1960 where a large majority of Americans (including republicans) considered themselves liberal. The same survey was performed a few years ago, and hardly anyone wanted to identify themselves as that.