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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JB Books" data-source="post: 1993536" data-attributes="member: 6889">Interesting:Campaign Stops November 18, 2012, 11:14 pmIs Rush Limbaughs Country Gone?By THOMAS B. EDSALLThe morning after the re-election of President Obama, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners:I went to bed last night thinking were outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion wed had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not weve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking weve lost the country.  I dont know how else you look at this.The conservative talk show host, who had been an upbeat, if initially doubtful, Romney supporter throughout the campaign, was on a post-election downer:In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins? And say what you want, but Romney did offer a vision of traditional America. In his way, he put forth a great vision of traditional America, and it was rejected. It was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working arent doing enough to help those who arent. And that resonated.Limbaugh echoed a Republican theme that was voiced before and after the election: Barack Obama has unleashed a coalition of Americans who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it that thats an entitlement. And the government should give it to them as Mitt Romney put it in his notorious commentary on the 47 percent.You can find this message almost everywhere on the right side of the spectrum. The Heritage Foundation, for example, annually calculates an Index of Dependence on Government, which grows every year:Today, more people than ever before depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions. The United States reached another milestone in 2010: For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes. It is the conjunction of these two trendshigher spending on dependence-creating programs, and an ever-shrinking number of taxpayers who pay for these programsthat concerns those interested in the fate of the American form of government.William Bennett, conservative stalwart, television commentator and secretary of education under President Reagan, complained on the CNN Web site that Democrats have been successful in settingthe parameters and focus of the national and political dialogue as predominantly about gender, race, ethnicity and class. This is the paradigm, the template through which many Americans, probably a majority, more or less view the world, our country, and the election. It is a divisive strategy and Democrats have targeted and exploited those divides. How else can we explain that more young people now favor socialism to capitalism?In fact, the 2011 Pew Research Center poll Bennett cites demonstrates that in many respects conservatives are right to be worried: Not only does a plurality (49-43) of young people hold a favorable view of socialism and, by a tiny margin (47-46), a negative view of capitalism so do liberal Democrats, who view socialism positively by a solid 59-33; and African Americans, 55-36. Hispanics are modestly opposed, 49-44, to socialism, but they hold decisively negative attitudes toward capitalism, 55-32.Much of the focus in the media in recent years has been on the growing hard-line stance of the Republican Party. At the same time, there are significant developments taking place as a new left alliance forms to underpin the Democratic Party. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira originally described this alliance in 2002 as the emerging Democratic majority in a pioneering book of the same name. More recently, the pollster Stan Greenberg and a group of liberal activists have described it as the rising American electorate.Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has devoted much of her work to analyzing the changing shape of the liberal and conservative coalitions, said in an e-mail that the rising American electoratewill have profound implications because the R.A.E. has a very different approach to the role for government, very different views on race and tolerance, different views on gender roles, and very different views on economic opportunity and security. These are some of the biggest divides in our culture.Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal-left Campaign for Americas Future, put it more bluntly in a blog post:</blockquote>

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