Americans Coming Out Of The Progressive Closet?...

...Or just my silly, wishful thinking again?

Some encouraging poll numbers/trends show the American people growing move away from 'conservative' beliefs over the past several years. When you see all the various graphs all together, it's pretty convincing.

Kevin Drum has a follow-up post on this, summarizing: "In a nutshell, what I think happened is this: beginning in the early 90s the Republican Party hitched its wagon to two things: tax cuts and culture war politics. In the short term this worked nicely: people like low taxes and talk radio was pretty successful at keeping cultural conservatives in a constant state of inchoate outrage. George Bush and Karl Rove were this strategy's ultimate practitioners, and the attacks of 9/11, which they treated as a culture war issue, kept the GOP successful through the first part of this decade... But in the long term this strategy has been a disaster... The GOP isn't dead, and Democratic victories in future years are hardly assured. But there's not much question that Republicans are going to have to find a new schtick." I think that's about right.

Andrew Sullivan has more thoughts on what the Bush/Rove coalition did to conservatism.