| By Kay Steiger - Aug 24th, 2007 at 10:34 am EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Our friends over at ThinkProgress brought this up earlier in the week, but it turns out that we're smarter than conservatives -- or at least we read more. A full 34 percent of conservatives haven't picked up a book in the last year, while that number for liberals was only about 22 percent. The average number of books per year was kind of a wash, eight for conservatives versus nine for liberals (although I wonder what the distribution of Dan Brown books is).
This reminds me of what I learned in my wonderful voting behavior class in college. The people at either end of the reading scale tend to not change their minds very much about which party or candidate they support. This is because if you read a lot, you tend to either read things you agree with or immediately discount the things you don't agree with. Those that don't read a lot or are generally uninformed about public affairs tend to have a sort of blind loyalty to one party. The people that change their mind lie somewhere in the middle.
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What about progressives? Liberal and progressive are decidedly not synonymous, and treating them as such is a concession to conservative framing.
So, seriously, are we talking about: the international and technical definitions of "progressive" and "liberal", the inaccurate, ahistorical red-baiting uses flung by conservative pundits, or the use co-opted by liberals too spineless to take pride in their Enlightenment-era traditions of representative democracy, liberty, and regulated market capitalism? That's liberal democracy.
If you're more interested in participatory, direct democracy, and/or mixed or Keynesian economy, you might be a real progressive. Only a fraction of the federal Democratic Party is progressive, look at the size of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The CPC's only Senator is Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a democratic socialist. Many others are effectively social or labor democrats, who have to stay in the closet, even 18 years after market capitalism won out as the global economic system. The Greens, social democrats, socialists, labor democrats, and a few left libertarians are the only political allies progressive have, not the DLC or New Democrats (U.S.).