Christopher Beam tries to answer the question:
Since the election, conservatives have consoled themselves with the idea that Obama may have won, but America is still a “center-right nation.” But the phrase is tossed around with little evidence-possibly because there is none. Even if there were evidence, the term is so muddled as to be meaningless.
Read the whole thing. I’d say Beam’s problem is his insistence that a political term have some clearly defined meaning. Take the term “neoconservative” for example. Half the “serious” journalists in Washington have no idea what the word means, but we still understand what they’re saying when they use it. In the case of describing the United States as a ‘center-right nation,’ I think it’s pretty clear that this must be taken as relative to other countries. Beam’s not impressed by that explanation:
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