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The poll/article

As I was going trough the article, my foremost thought was, "What do the respondents think the labels actually represent?"

It is my long held observation that, when asked to connect the various political labels to real policy, social, economic, environmental, etc. definitions, most people have no reality-based idea. It's more of a tribal or sports team affinity thing - perhaps more about dislike of others than reality. Within the labelled groups themselves there is a wide, and and often personally transient, range of ideas about what a Conservative or Liberal or Independent political ideology is. In simplest form, the Other is just bad, no matter what. (Jordan Klepper has shown us that in grand fashion)

This perverse understanding is especially true of the Progressive label - my own experience with it was in the late 90's when a group of local activists (me included) got together to define an alternative to "Liberal", which the right had corrupted (ConROT-wise) into meaning something that none of us were to any meaningful extent. We spent a good deal of time discussing the art of framing (can't remember the name of the guy at the time who had gotten well-known for formularizing framing techniques) - both from the position of avoiding our "new" party getting trashed through framing, and also how to get ahead of opposition framing by framing them first. After multiple meetings, we decided to call ourselves Progressives - as it happened, the same thing was happening all over the country, so our label (and its specific definition) was lost from its inception to the chaotic seas of fellow travelers. Not long after, the Conservatives successfully framed it as bad, and there was no resistance.

As it happens, righties seem to be much more adept at corrupting information than lefties are. So the Gallup poll, in my assessment, is meaningless in terms of real ideological thinking, but very accurate in terms of which tribe people have been convinced to side with - which happens to be largely an effect of dishonest sales campaigns (political framing).

I recognize Perot's knowledge and facility with assessing and predicting how elections are likely to go, based on the realities of people generally being dupes of framing and not based on clear thinking. This is the reality of the human condition.

What I am interested in is understanding and creating solutions for that unfortunate human condition of sleepwalking through life, that is eating up the Earth and shitting out chaos and destruction.

My fundamental definitions for the Cons and the Libs?

Conservatives - selfish and stupid, with little consideration of the Other.

Liberals - selfish and stupid, with a nagging conscience about the welfare of the Whole.

There is a difference...

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller