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New York Pressarticle 
 The Harris polling agency last week released the
results of an interestingstudy. In a survey of 2209
adults, they discovered that most Americans only have
the vaguestidea of the meaning of two important pairs
of words that play crucial roles in the
nationalpolitical discourse: conservative and liberal,
and leftand right.

Some of the numbers are surprising. According to
thesurvey, 37 percent of Americans think liberals
oppose gun control, or else they are not sure if
liberals oppose gun control. Likewise, 27 percent of
respondents thought a right-winger wassomeone who
supported affirmative action. Furthermore, the survey
showed that respondentsgenerally viewed the paired
concepts liberals and left-wingers  and
conservativesand right-wingers  as possessing,
respectively, generally similarpolitical beliefs—with
one caveat. In both cases, respondents were roughly 10
percent more clueless aboutleft-wingers and
right-wingers than they were about liberals and
conservatives.

"The label left-winger is broadly perceived to
besimilar to liberal," the agency concluded, "except
that more people are not sure what itmeans."



Respondents were asked to define the labelsaccording
to what their positions were on seven "political
issues": abortion rights, gun control,cutting taxes,
gay rights, same-sex marriage, affirmative action and
moral values. This listof issues is preposterous in
itself as a symbolic reflection of the political
landscape, but that's adiscussion for another time. To
me the most instructive category was "moral values."
According tothe survey, 78 percent of respondents
believe conservatives support moral values, while only
40percent said the same about left-wingers. In fact,
29 percent said they believed left-wingersactually
opposed moral values.


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