Rumors are flying that Dick the Dick could resign. I think maybe we’re all getting a little overheated.

Also–via Kevin Drum, I see that Paul Waldman stumbled onto a truth I wrote about awhile back. A couple of truths, in fact. Waldman writes,

Yet Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) raise a caution. Americans, they argue, are pretty conservative; no matter what is going on this week or this month, conservatives far outnumber liberals, so Democrats always start at a disadvantage. Democrats who want their party to stand up for a strong progressive agenda, they claim, are barking up the wrong tree. Democrats must stick to the center, or lose.

Even those with impeccably liberal pedigrees are making this argument, such as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. “According to the network exit polls, 21 percent of the voters who cast ballots in 2004 called themselves liberal, 34 percent said they were conservative and 45 percent called themselves moderate,” Dionne wrote. … Michael Barone of the National Journal looked at the same numbers and pronounced us to have “a conservative electorate.” Evan Bayh, a probable candidate for president, cited the same figures to argue for a more centrist Democratic Party. “Do the math,” he said. Noam Scheiber of The New Republic pronounced the liberal/conservative/moderate split “the most important thing you need to know about contemporary politics.”

As I wrote earlier,

But the problem with this explanation is that the word liberal has been so demonized by the Right that even liberals don’t know what it means any more. I’d be willing to bet that a whopping large amount of people who call themselves “moderate” are liberals who don’t know it, or who would be liberals if someone could make a case for liberal government without some rightie goon dancing about shrieking “Tax and spend! Tax and spend!” …

….Frankly, I think genuine liberalism has been absent from public discourse and policy for so long that I think today’s voters might find it quite refreshing. Considering the younger ones have never been exposed to liberalism before, maybe we should call it something else and tell ’em it’s a new new thing. I bet they’d take to it like ducks to a pond.

Fact is, a lot of people who don’t call themselves liberals hold liberal ideas, whether they understand that those ideas are “liberal” or not. People don’t know what the word liberal means any more. The righties have done such a through job of demonizing the word that people are afraid of it. It’s like the hoards of people who say they believe in equal rights for women, “but I’m not a feminist.”

I smack such people whenever I meet one, btw, so if this applies to you, keep your distance.

Waldman writes that the “median voter” sure looks like a liberal.

At this moment in history, that voter is pro-choice, wants to increase the minimum wage, favors strong environmental protections, likes gun control, thinks corporations have too much power and that the rich get away with not paying their fair share in taxes, believes the Iraq War was a mistake, wants a foreign policy centered on diplomacy and strong alliances, and favors civil unions for gays and lesbians. Yet despite all this, those voters identify themselves as “moderate.”

And we know why this is true, don’t we? Waldman writes,

The answer lies in a decades-long campaign to make the word an epithet — from Ronald Reagan taunting Michael Dukakis as “liberal, liberal, liberal” to a host of Senate candidates who faced television ads calling them “embarrassingly liberal” or “shockingly liberal.” Through endless repetition, conservatives succeeded in associating “liberal” with a series of traits that stand apart from specific issues: weakness, vacillation, moral uncertainty, and lack of patriotism, to name a few.

For example,

Liberals may write best-selling books about why George W. Bush is a terrible president, but conservatives write best-selling books about why liberalism is a pox on our nation (talk radio hate-monger Michael Savage, for instance, titled his latest book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder).

That’s exactly what I wrote here. I did a title search and found (as of May 2005):

Books by conservatives with the words liberal or liberalism in the title (not including the Michael Savage titles already named above):

* Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
* Ann Coulter, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
* Ann Coulter, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
* Mona Charen, Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First
* Mona Charen, Do Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)
* Sean Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
* Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism
* John Podhoretz, How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane
* David Limbaugh, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity
* Michael S. Rose, Goodbye Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church
* Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Modern Liberalism and American Decline

If I expanded this search to include “The Left” I could list a great many more titles along the same lines, and most of them sold a respectable number of copies.

Now here’s my list of books by liberals with conservatives or conservatism in the title:

* Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

And that was the only title I found, unless you include:

* Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America

Mr. Lind is a recent convert from neoconservatism, and I don’t know for sure that he’s calling himself a liberal. So that title may not count.

As I wrote in an even earlier post, it’s easy to find broad-brush condemnations of liberalism coming from conservatism. But it’s remarkably difficult to find broad-brush condemnations of conservatism coming from liberals.

Sure, there was plenty of snarking about conservatism. But when liberals attack conservatives, liberals tend to be person- or issue-specific, and give reasons — This guy is a jerk because he did thus-and-so. This policy stinks because it’s going to have such-and-such effect.

Kevin suggests we fight back by “focusing on extremist conservative ideology, something we don’t do often enough.” We on the Blogosphere focus on it, but are we demonizing it the way the righties demonized liberalism? I’m not sure we’ve got it in us to do that. Although I’m willing to give it a shot.

But we’ve got to remember that conservatives are all about defending the Powers That Be–the corporations, the military-industrial complex, and various entrenched institutions dedicated to keeping the powerful in power and the playing field as uneven as possible. All they have to do to defeat us is make people afraid of us. Demonizing forces for change and real reform,* ensures that the status quo will win by default.

(*What righties call “reform” amounts to dismantling what’s left of the New Deal and reversing all civil rights case law since the McKinley Administration–“reforming” backward instead of forward, in other words. We might call that “unreform.”)

But liberalism has to do more than make people afraid of conservatives. We have to give people a vision of empowerment and hope, that government can be better, and can do better, to make America a better place for all of us.

And before we can do that we must neutralize what Steve M. calls the “Protocols of the Elders of Liberalism.”

Given that the Right pretty much controls mass media, that’s not going to be easy. But I believe we have to try. And maybe if enough people become disillusioned by the Right, they’ll be ready to listen to what we have to say.