You're trying valiantly to shoehorn a common perception about contemporary politics into the old familliar paradigm of a linear political spectrum, and coming up a bit short.

The capital-R Right is distorting that old familiar way of looking at things by exerting a disproportionate influence, both positively and negatively, on a lot of people. The best way to explain it is to refer back to a set of bar graphs you posted in the spring depicting political identification. Among self-identified Democrats, people further divided themselves evenly among the ideological labels liberal, moderate, and conservative.

But in the Republican set, a sliver of embattled moderates and a few confused liberals were overawed by the 72% who labelled themselves Conservatives. It was striking, visually, the pillar of RightWingers looming over a relatively flat plain of moderates and liberals like Sauron's Dark Tower.

My point is that the Right has made of itself something singular in American life, something that really isn't balanced by its mirror-equivalent on the Left. Something that, like Sauron's Tower, looms forbiddingly over the land and casts a psychological shadow out of proportion to its true power.

There is no "Liberal Movement" to answer the Conservative Movement. And so it's natural that those of us who aren't part of your movement see it as opposed to all the rest of us. We're not caught in the middle between you and the nonexistent "Liberal Movement" at our backs, your targets are clearly everyone who doesn't agree with you.

BTW, I understand the poll's been updated, and Republican identification is down to 20%. I'm guessing that the conservative identification is near 100%, so congratulations are in order: Looks to me like you've succeeded in purging the last revenant of moderates and liberals from the GOP.