A number of (mostly liberal) readers are misinterpreting my point in this passage from my piece on Progressivism’s hangover:

A little more than a year later, we surely have been hoing leftward. But it already seems as if the American people are sick of it. The 2009 off-year elections might not have been a repudiation of Obama, but they were definitely not an embrace of Obamaism. Meanwhile, by nearly 2 to 1, Americans say the country is on the wrong track. Obama’s approval ratings have slumped severely. Independent voters have abandoned the Democrats. The only populist fervor out there is fueling the anti-tax, pro-limited-government “Tea Party” movement, which is now more popular than either the GOP or the Democrats. Even last spring, when anti–Wall Street fervor was justifiably high, more Americans viewed “big government” as a bigger threat to the country than “big business.”
Obama’s signature domestic-policy goal, health-care reform, is decidedly unpopular with a majority of Americans. And a Rasmussen Reports poll last week found that 70 percent of respondents either support waterboarding the Christmas bomber suspect or are unsure whether we should. Only 30 percent subscribe to Obama’s position. And that’s after an unsuccessful terrorist attack.

I could list all the ways readers have misconstrued this passage, but instead I’ll just explain my point. All I’m suggesting here is that if we were really at year one of a new Progressive era you wouldn’t expect to have a poll result that bolsters the Bush administration’s position and runs counter to so much of the high-flown rhetoric of Barack Obama. That seems both obvious and irrefutable to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should waterboard anyone just because the majority of Americans support it. There are some things worth opposing even if super-majorities think otherwise.

But if you don’t find the waterboarding-polling thing persuasive, that’s fine. A better example, that I didn’t mention, is the finding re-confirmed by Gallup today, that self-identified conservatives continue to outnumber self-identified liberals by 2-1. Yes, yes, the Gallup finding lends itself to many interpretations. But I would contend that one interpretation it doesn’t lend itself to is the claim that we’re at the dawn of a new Progressive era. Heck, even Harold Meyerson agrees with me (now).