RE: Re: We are what's left

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Rob writes:>Jim's plenty left for me. <

thanks.

BTW, there was a recent effort to pin down the extremely vagud left/right
metaphor by a couple of political scientists (I don't remember their names,
but it was reported by SLATE magazine and by Paul Krugman). Their project
was to draw a "map" in which U.S. senators who voted in similar ways were
close together in space (the way Perth and Brisbane seem to be close
together for those of us who've never been down under). Surprisingly, there
are only two dimensions to their "map." "Up vs. down" in U.S. politics
refers to civil rights issues, while "left" vs. "right" is about class and
inequality. The former dimension has become less important over time, say
these folks, but the latter still works. One of my senators (Barbara Boxer)
ends up on the extreme left, which may say something about the limits of
this research. More importantly to me, it seems that the meaning of "the
middle" changes over time. JD